

Harvard + MIT = edX - tpatke
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18191589

======
intended
Its nearly a year since Panos put up his blog post on cheating, which was
discussed on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254>

With online courses which confer degrees/certification to students from all
over the world, there is far too much of a vested interest in optimizing to
the shortest path required to get the degree. Its no longer a subject pool of
auto didacts, but a subject pool where auto didacts are the minority and
degree/certifacte focused individuals are in the majority.

Many students aren't like that - but if they come from a background which
doesn't give a damn whether you learned something as long as you got a
degree/cert from X uni.

If in the end, if the shortest path is just doing the test, turning in the
Homework, and ticking attendance, then someone will be doing it for a price.
They already are doing it in colleges.

The scale of it in turn makes peer review, or group work, complex projects
which require active scrutiny, hard, if not impossible to execute.

I don't see how this can't end with course material being put out by one
group, and standardized testing being done by someone else, a la the CFA or
other certification exams.

~~~
michaelt
Yes, I absolutely expect there will be test centres where students pay to sit
the exam in exam conditions. There's no other way to produce credible results.
But the test centre would only need to be a tarted up cybercafe.

Do you envisage the course material and exam being designed by MIT but the
exams being administered by some other party, or would the other party also
design the exam (as is the case with CFA)?

~~~
intended
Thanks for the question, I have only my best guess as the answer which is a
Pearson vue style system to take all the tests.

I imagine that it will end up being a version of the GRE.

------
marknutter
Whenever anyone defends the current brick and morder model of college
education they do a lot of handwaving about the benefits of small classrooms,
access to professors, and the "college experience". In my college experience
which was at the University of Minnesota, one of the biggest colleges in the
world both in terms of enrollment and campus size, most of the professors
didn't seem passionate about teaching. They were talking "at" these massive
auditoriums filled with half-interested kids. I always resented having to
physically go to class, especially since I had a long commute to school every
day. Rushing back and forth across this massive campus from class to class
seemed ridiculous to me as well. I get that some kids need that personal
attention from professors and TAs to learn, but I certainly didn't. I learn
best on my own, at my own pace, and in the comfort of my own home.

~~~
tokenadult
_In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota,_

My two postsecondary degrees are both from the University of Minnesota. As a
Chinese major in the 1970s, my typical class size for in-major courses shrank
down to three or four students total by the third year of the program. (First-
year Chinese had fifty students in three sections in those days; second-year
had fifteen in one section.) One of the great things about huge brick-and-
mortar state universities over the last century has been having a large enough
critical mass of students to offer rarely sought courses like Chinese (in
those days) or Attic Greek or Classical Nahuatl (any day) or other courses
that my friends took while enrolled. Harvard has enough sheer money from its
endowment to offer Sanskrit or other rarely studied courses

[http://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=4137186&whence=item...](http://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=4137186&whence=item%3fid%3d4136069)

even if those courses gain very low enrollments. Most other universities
subsidize limited enrollments in rare courses with high enrollments in the
commonplace courses.

The great thing about more and more university-level courses going online is
that eventually there should be a niche for university-level courses delivered
online on almost any subject that has ever been treated in a university-level
course. That will allow, I hope, curious learners to shop around and figure
out which general statistics course (a HUGE enrollment course) and which
Aramaic course (a course with tiny enrollment in the best of times) offers the
most return of learning for the investment of time, effort, and some amount of
money to take the course.

I think many brick-and-mortar universities, and perhaps approximately one
state "flagship" university per state, will still be able to survive the
onslaught of competition from online courses for a while because of prior
claims to credentialing students and the advantage of in-person interaction
with other students (and with some less introverted instructors). But further
diversity of provision of courses allows each provider to specialize in what
it does best, and should make learning more efficient (in the economist's
sense of "efficient") for everyone.

P.S. The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of
Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the
university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of
seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.

AFTER EDIT, responding to a point in another comment:

Yes, independent test centers with good test security will help online
credentials gain acceptance, and Udacity has already anticipated this problem.
Udacity has announced in a blog post, "Udacity in partnership with Pearson VUE
announces testing centers,"

[http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/udacity-in-
partnership-w...](http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/udacity-in-partnership-
with-pearson-vue.html)

a partnership "to make our classes count towards a credential that is
recognized by employers." So this is an example of unbundling the package that
is currently offered by degree-granting universities. The universities both
teach courses and administer tests, and claim therefore to offer credentials
that can be trusted. But one group of organizations could offer a wide
selection of courses, while another group of organizations offers a wide
selection of credentialing tests, and I expect that to be the wave of the
future.

~~~
marknutter
> The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of
> Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the
> university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes
> of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.

You mean in the Fall and the Spring, right? ;)

------
jknupp
I'm still unclear what the business model for universities (as opposed to
private companies) in this space is. The problem is, they will inevitably be
compared to (and in some sense compete against) their non-virtual
counterparts. Especially when they've essentially given away all their course
materials and lecture videos for free, and considering these classes are not
for credit, I just don't see the benefit for the average person over studying
what's already freely available. And one can't even make the argument that the
free resources aren't meant to be used to learn a subject (as is the case with
most free reference material), since these were obviously created with
precisely that goal in mind.

When they inevitably move to a tuition based model, the ever present question
of "the real MIT or the online one?" may be too much to overcome.

~~~
Hyena
They don't need to generate a profit and it would be preferable if there was
no profitable business model for it. Donations to both MIT and Harvard are
considered charitable; making more of their classes freely available online
would justify that.

~~~
jknupp
To say it would be preferable if there were no profitable business model is
short-sighted. It would mean that the only entities capable of undertaking
something like this would be existing universities (and the wave of private
companies offering a wide curriculum of online courses would end). Those
universities that attempted something similar would at best be able to merely
recoup costs. In short, the higher education revolution would amount to
existing universities putting classes online. Why in the world is that
preferable?

~~~
waterlesscloud
New charitable organizations would also be able to enter the market.

