[araftery]

A new form accreditation is really what's holding back a huge change in higher education. MOOCs right now, at most, can replace only traditional professional development classes. They're still not a drop-in replacement for college degrees.

That's because of accreditation. Bachelors degrees are valuable, in large part, because they're a common currency: employers know when they see a potential hire has bachelor's degree, he/she at least spent four years learning at a high level and fulfilled some level of competency in his/her chosen major.

Right now, there's no way for employers to make similar judgments about people who have obtained their education entirely online, so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé. In that case, you'd need to build up a portfolio of OSS projects, etc. Whereas a newly-minted bachelor's in CS will get your foot in the door somewhere, even without that extra work to back it up.

One approach to accreditation/evaluation are domain-specific exams, like the Boards in medicine or the Bar in law. But just passing an exam doesn't necessarily communicate the same thing as a degree, and thus doesn't really solve the problem. There are also, no doubt, disciplines not well suited to this form of accreditation. This approach (Alyxandria) seems more focused on accrediting courses (which solves the same problem) and does it by peer-reviewing those courses, which I think is a very interesting, credible, and scalable approach.

Right now, LinkedIn might be the closest competitor out there to this. They offer a form of peer-review for one's skills with their endorsement feature. Another company that was trying to tackle this problem is Accredible[1], but it seems they've now pivoted to include many more features than peer accreditation — perhaps at its expense.

It'll be really cool to see how this problem is solved in the long run. I think "accrediting" individuals, rather than institutions or classes that individuals can then take, will be the winning strategy, as education becomes increasingly unbundled. That is, if articles, YouTube videos, etc. are to be considered legitimate tools of learning in the future, as college classes are today, then accreditation of individuals will be the only sensible approach.

[1]: http://www.accredible.com

[snowwrestler]

This might be heresy here on HN, but I think that there is more than accreditation paperwork at play here. I think it remains to be proven whether a MOOC actually does deliver an education that is on par with what you would get from attending a 4-year CS degree program at a college or university.

MOOCs are new and exciting, but they're also new and unproven. Accredited bachelor degrees are valued because they have a long history of delivering value. MOOCs do not.

[araftery]

I think you're spot on. The challenge is to find away to evaluate both on a level playing field. A CS grad from different caliber universities probably (on average) have different levels of competency. Even graduates from the same university won't have the same level of skill. For traditional colleges, employers can cut through these asymmetries by using heuristics like institutional prestige and metrics like GPA.

The key is to find a method of credentialing general enough that it can apply to both traditional, college-educated job applicants and non-traditional ones alike.

Whether MOOCs will be enough for those non-traditional applicants to be successful in this modern credential system is a separate issue, and, as you point out, far from certain.

[sampo]

> "so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé"

Well this is not a general solution, but for Coursera's Probabilistic Graphical Models, I remember someone in the course discussion board said that this was such a demanding course that he would hire anybody, who passed the course with good points, to his company.

[TheOtherHobbes]

"so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé"

I think most wise recruiters will look for evidence of being smart, of getting stuff done, and of being a good fit.

Unless you're in research, serious jobs are project based, not learning based.

If you spend three years learning all you can about CS and making an Awesome Cool Thing, I don't think many employers are going to think 'Meh.'

The situation in the UK is that degrees are getting more and more expensive and less and less valuable. It's making more sense now to go straight into work, even at intern level, than to lose three years and rack up tens of thousands in debt for no obvious benefit.

<i>If</i> the teaching and learning were truly worth the cash, it would be no contest. But outside the Big Name universities, they really aren't. And even there, a big part of the benefit comes the networking opportunities.

In middle league universities you don't get the networking, or the teaching, or the experience, or the industry connections. So what are you paying for?

[grayclhn]

It would be fun if the general solution was making online classes absurdly hard. Unfortunately, it's hard enough to stop cheating on exams in physical lecture halls, so once a high grade guarantees students job interviews....

[majc2]

...we will know if they know the material or not?

I don't think cheating on exams is that widespread, what are others experiences?

[grayclhn]

Companies already can choose to interview anyone who's taken relevant coursework, but usually can't commit that much time so they screen applicants first. If the grades in a few particular online courses become widely known for getting students interviews, I think most of us would expect cheating in those classes to rise and the classes' role as a screening mechanism would degrade.

I don't have data on cheating available, but anecdotally, I've TAed economics classes at UCSD where---routinely---over 100 students in a class would turn in word-for-word identical homework (this had nothing to do with whether students were allowed or prohibited from "working in groups" on homework, so it was definitely considered cheating in some of the classes). I suspect that cheating varies a lot from university to university and from major to major.

[michaelt]

Reliably measuring cheating is of course difficult; we can measure /detected/ cheating, we cannot measure /undetected/ cheating.

And who can blame students for cheating considering the incentives - I was never faced with the choice to cheat or fail, but you can bet if I'd gone $70,000 into debt for school I'd cheat before I'd fail.

I once sat in a computer lab and watched a group of four guys completing an online take-it-when-you-like multiple choice exam for first year mathematics for engineers. The software attempted to prevent copy-and-paste and changing windows to Google, and of course there were instructions saying the exam should be their work alone, and they shouldn't look up answers. One of the guys was on the exam system and would read the question; his three peers on computers next to him would google for and calculate answers. Needless to say, by the time the fourth guy was doing the exam his results had little to do with how much mathematics he had personally learned!