
Open Ph.D.: An Experiment in Higher Learning - michael_nielsen
http://openphd.wordpress.com/
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scott_s
Course work is the least important part of a Ph.D. Most of the work and
learning is in the research.

~~~
jballanc
Meh, most of the research will fail. The true learning happens in the
surroundings. Most of what you learn will come from the stories and shared
experiences of your peers, post-docs, and professors. This is why academies
have existed for so long through history.

This is also why I love this approach! The Ph.D. will only be successful if
it's possible to replace the surroundings and people of academy with the
internet. If she's successful, the success will be self evident.
Unfortunately, I still have my doubts about the chances of success.

~~~
hughprime
I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail". In my
experience most (proper scientific) research succeeds eventually, both in the
sense that it (a) gives the authors something to write a paper about and (b)
it adds something, however small, to the total accumulated store of human
knowledge.

I will say, though, that while reading a paper, or a book, or even going to a
lecture, can be useful from time to time, just about everything I learned in
my PhD and postdoc was learned from face-to-face conversation with people who
knew more than I did. The internet can't replace that.

~~~
jballanc
_I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail"._

I've been working toward my Ph.D. for 7 years now. In that time, I've been
involved in no fewer than 15 different research projects. Many of those made
it a month or two before the results indicated that there was nothing
interesting to be learned, and we moved on to the next problem. (The value of
negative results is a topic for a different debate.)

What I meant by my statement is that, if you took the research that a graduate
student does in a lab at a university, and then had them do the same research
in a lab in their basement (or some other isolated environment without peers
and mentors), they wouldn't learn nearly as much as they do in the university
setting. The specific research being done isn't as important as the setting in
which it is done.

~~~
psyklic
Questionable -- they would certainly learn _different things_ if they did it
in their basement. For example, so much in university is already set up for
you -- constructing your own lab in your basement, calibrating machines,
writing custom software to run experiments, etc. would be quite a learning
experience. (I'm talking about experimental fields here.)

But more importantly, in universities you are guided away from things that do
not work usually without entirely understanding why. Through independent
study, you would go down these incorrect paths and have a much richer
understanding. Instead of doing things how everyone else does them, you'd gain
new perspectives than the status quo, and this would give you a leg up.

Of course, this all presumes that the student is extremely self motivated.
Unfortunately, even at the graduate level these students are very rare. This
is why some professors are very hands on and others are very hands off --
different students work best at different levels of independence.

------
fburnaby
A very cool experiment, and I hope it goes well. But don't you _get_ funded to
do a Ph.D? Isn't this more expensive (i.e. no stipend) than actually going to
a school?

I suppose it may be hard to interest a university in some research on open
education...

~~~
jballanc
_Some_ Ph.D.'s get funded, but even then the amount is laughable (try living
off $20,000/yr in NYC).

~~~
swolchok
$20,000/yr is less than I get from the CSE program at Michigan. Surely you're
exaggerating?

~~~
Perceval
My stipend is only $17000. That's up from when I started four years ago at
$13500. That covers rent and food, but obviously not books. Of course,
Baltimore is far cheaper than New York, but it's still possible to live on.

~~~
tocomment
What are you doing?

~~~
Perceval
Political science (major: international relations, minor: comparative
politics). I've talked to some of the students in hard sciences (e.g. bio) and
they report stipends of $23000. It's probably just set department-by-
department, and mine either happens to be poor or stingy.

