
What happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT classes - capex
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/what-happens-when-people-in-pakistan-start-taking-mit-classes/277580/
======
angersock
I'm pleased to see the English language spreading again as a universal
language of learning and engineering.

No, I am in no way going to benefit from this as a murrican. :)

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e3pi
"Coursera has taken the lead in responding. The company announced in May that
it was partnering with several organizations, including the Viktor Pinchuk
Foundation in Ukraine, to provide subtitling for lectures in select courses in
Arabic, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian."

Like the pro bono of lawyers, Senator Ron Wyden(Oregon), the senator attacking
PRISM, etc, should legislate all those thousands(?) of language specialists of
the NSA and CIA be required to translate MOOC courses for our third world
brothers and sisters. All these specialists could learn new subjects too.

Wouldn't that be nice?

~~~
mayneack
Wyden:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden)

~~~
e3pi
Thank you. I still had time to edit correction.

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6d0debc071
I learned more from the clubs I joined and/or formed in university than I did
from the lectures.

I do wonder whether, as the technical content becomes more widely accessible,
there'll be

A) A premium put on conscientiousness.

and

B) Whether clubs for specific topics will become more popular.

The second one is very ... odd ... because it would seem to require either a
provision for local spaces that isn't currently there (but might be as
libraries change) or much better tools for online communities.

~~~
gngeal
_I learned more from the clubs I joined and /or formed in university than I
did from the lectures._

However, it's great for schizoid people who may not have the same options that
you had.

~~~
6d0debc071
Hmm?

If we look at one of the main virtues of uni as being the people it lets you
meet, then I'd have thought that solitary people wouldn't have much of an
advantage from attending a brick and mortar as compared to a correspondence
course or similar.

Though I suppose one might argue that access to experts is important, that's -
to my mind - a much more dicey proposition.

Do you mean that the nature of university is such that they'll be _forced_ to
make friends?

~~~
gngeal
Not necessarily "forced", but I was certainly much uncomfortable. A brick and
mortar type of school is good if you need access to equipment and labs, but
fortunately, my interests don't include practical nuclear engineering or brain
surgery.

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coldtea
> _Twenty-five-year-old Khalid Raza lives in Shakargarh but is taking "The
> Challenges of Global Poverty," a course taught by a former adviser to the
> World Bank and a professor of international economics at MIT._

Great. Now the whole world can get indoctrinated into neo-liberal economics
and the like, and the educated in all countries can adopt the ideology of the
ruiling empire. /s

Now, while this is indeed great for hard sciences, medicine and technology,
it's very problematic for ideological and soft courses, from History to
Economics to Sociology etc.

It might not be clear, but imagine the inverse: American students getting
their sociology knowledge from Pakistani scholars -- with the whole
ideological baggage that will carry with respect to the treatment of women,
issues of personal freedom, etc.

The same harm works both ways.

~~~
Tloewald
"Harm"? Seems to me that learning about other cultures is very seldom harmful
-- in either direction. In any event, I fail to see how exposing people in
pakistan to our ideological baggage would be a bad thing overall -- they're
already getting ideological baggage from hellfire missiles.

~~~
thiagoharry
As a brazilian, I personally have the impression that the teachings in
humanities in the USA is very biased towards neo-liberalism, pro-market and
right-wing ideologies when I compare what's produced in brazilian and north
american universities. This is probably because in the USA the universities
are private, there's no free, autonomous and statal universities. And probably
it's consequence of the cold war years, when left wing ideologies were seen as
suspect. If I could choose a place to study computer science, engineering or
science in general, I would choose some north-american university like MIT.
But if I could choose a place to study humanities, specially economy or social
science, I wouldn't choose a north-american university. Just my (perhaps
equivocated) opinion. But it's an opinion shared by many people in humanities
here.

~~~
saturdaysaint
Totally off. As someone that was a humanities major at a private American
college, I have to say that %99 of the faculty could fairly be described as
very left-leaning, and this is basically the case in every university I've
heard of. It's almost comical how left leaning academia is - to be publicly
Republican professor would probably be something of a career liability outside
of a select few Christian schools. At my school, College Republicans struggled
to find a faculty sponsor, while the famous socialist Howard Zinn spoke to a
rousing crowd full of professors. Any subject from Shakespeare to the Civil
War could and would be analyzed through the lenses of class, race, gender,
colonialism.

The exception, relevant to this thread, would probably be economics
departments, but even then, I have the impression that there'd at least be a
healthy majority of Keynsians that would strongly object to austerity and
support a lot of government interventions. So even there, I think "pro-market
and right-wing" would be a stretch.

~~~
jljljl
>> healthy majority of Keynesians

I don't disagree with the general text of your post, but this is really,
really school dependent. I would actually bet it's easier to find non-
Keynesian professors.

Kenynesian theory is also a pretty "pro-market" approach when compared to some
theories that exist outside the US. Government intervention is generally
supposed to be limited to periods of recession.

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rowanseymour
The growth of MOOCs is clearly massive for the developing world where access
to high quality educational resources is limited, but what does it mean for
countries like the US? Can a person get the same quality of education from
online courses as traditional courses? Can those courses be graded and
accredited in a way which means something to employers? Or are we forever
stuck in a model of higher education where graduating from a prestigious
university is the only thing that matters, and you pay more for the prestige
than the actual education itself?

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
I guess that since these MOOCs are essentially online study groups with very
minimal direct interaction with professors/teaching assistants, it is very
hard to verify that a student actually did all the work without help from
others. Since educations are essentially tickets to getting job interviews,
the incentives for cheating are high. I think that is indeed a problem which
needs to be addressed. Maybe by introducing course centers where participants
can take an online exam under controlled conditions, i.e., in the presence of
observers?

~~~
rowanseymour
That seems to be direction that some organisations are taking MOOCs. I know
here Rwanda, there's new pilot program called Kepler[1] which is going to use
MOOCs as the primary teaching tool, but have students sit exams (under
observation) for a "competency based" degree offered by a university in the
US.

[1] [http://cloudmeetscampus.com/](http://cloudmeetscampus.com/)

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
That sounds interesting. From the home page, it even seems that the program
offers housing with other students, giving them a good study environment. The
tuition seems to be around $1000-$1500 - I don't know what the average income
is in Rwanda, but I assume that this is manageable for most people?

~~~
rowanseymour
It's comparable to what local universities charge, and they have no problem
attracting students - the quality of education might not be great but you need
a degree for most government jobs, and other employers place a lot of weight
on that piece of paper that says you're educated. The government also provides
a lot of scholarships and loans.

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xerophtye
I see a lot of untapped technological potential in Pakistan. In the past
decade they have set records for some of the youngest tech wiz kids in the
world, with the youngest nearly 9 years old with a Microsoft certification!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arfa_Karim](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arfa_Karim)

~~~
Tloewald
I think that if you had an incredibly bright kid in a first world country you
probably would have more interesting things for that kid to do than get a
Microsoft Certification. (And it totally sucks she died at 16.)

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dschiptsov
MIT placed lots of courses online long before MOOC boom.

Nowadays Coursera is the dominant MOOC platform with some very decent courses,
at least on CS/AI/Neuroscience subjects.

Yale is another source of high quality materials, while Berkeley sucks after
rewriting its site and removing bunch of old courses, including classic Scheme
based CS 61A and courses on Buddhism studies.

~~~
WalterGR
> Berkeley sucks after rewriting its site and removing bunch of old courses,
> including classic Scheme based CS 61A and courses on Buddhism studies.

The oldest CS61A I found on
[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science)
is spring 2008. It's taught by Brian Harvey and is Scheme-based:
[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL6879A8466C44A5D5)

~~~
dschiptsov
Yeah, this is the best version available, while he is still using classic text
terminal. So classy.))

~~~
WalterGR
> So classy.

CS61A is one of the best courses I took in college and Brian Harvey was one of
the best lecturers I had.

So whatever he uses, I'd say it works.

~~~
dschiptsov
"All you need is Lambda".))

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capex
The typical Pakistani education glosses over the real deal, the fundamental
understanding of a topic. MOOCs are changing that. The qualification wouldn't
get people interviews in Pakistan, but it would enhance their understanding
nonetheless.

------
Stwerner
I just finished Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City the other day, and after
reading this article, I'm really excited to see how his theory about education
level being a major factory in whether a city succeeds or not is affected.

I doubt we'll see any short term changes, but in places that don't have good
access to education (or in places with an education system like Feynman
experienced in Brazil) I can't help but wonder what kind of changes the world
is going to experience as average global education level skyrockets due to
MOOCs.

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jjindev
This is slightly tangential, but bear with me. I'm mid-50's, and when I
started programming it was a weird thing. I'd say I was a computer programmer,
and I might have been the first one that normal people had actually met.

It is amazing now to see the world buried in programmers (and more being
produced with people from Pakistan & etc. in Coursera's Startup Engineering).

More amazing that a lot of really good work is being done.

So how does it graph? Plateau or Vinge-ian take-off?

Is the flocking around software apps appropriate or an over-concentration of
human capital?

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newsign
Universities offering degrees thru MOOC will bring revolution in terms of
employment/unemployment and labor market in general .... i can foresee a
scenario where for every single job position there will be lot more
international applicant ready to work remotely 10 times cheaper than the same
qualified person in 1st world countries ...

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mapmeld
The article tells a short anecdote, but does not discuss motivation or future
plans of the student, popularity of the program in Pakistan, whether schools
and other institutions in Pakistan may start using MOOC material like
community colleges in the US... at the end of the day this article does not
tell us what happens at all.

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eliasmacpherson
Their own military industrial complex might start to flourish? I suppose it
depends on what classes are available online.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_Arms_Industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_Arms_Industry)

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frozenport
Admitably coursera classes arent starting from much, I was part of a parralel
programming class mirrored on coursera and those folks did 4 I weeks of our
semester class without the final project. I wonder if we will see a cheapening
siniliar to ted talks

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CmonDev
They don't give you a diploma though. And I bet it would be a separate kind of
diploma. And it's not just degree but also connections. An ex-MIT is likely to
hire another ex-MIT. So not much is happening at the moment.

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ommunist
It may end up with Al-Quran classes in Massachusets.

~~~
daliusd
Those who will learn this class will be accused that they learn from wrong
source. I was accused once for reading wrong bible :) I'm not even very
religious.

