
Professors of Online Courses Don’t Think Their Students Deserve Credit - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-courses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/
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waterlesscloud
From the original article- "However, it's worth noting that more than a
quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve
credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke,
and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science,
and engineering."

Which makes sense, those are subjects which are probably best suited to this
kind of approach.

I've taken a number of MOOCs, from EDx, Coursera, and Udacity. I'm an addict,
always in at least one and plan to pretty much permanently keep doing them as
long as it's possible to do so.

The 6.002x from EDx was probably the most rigorous of the ones I've done, and
I felt a solid sense of accomplishment when it was over. But I don't think I
should be awarded MIT credit for it, mostly due to the limited substitutions
for lab work.

In fact, I don't think college credit would be appropriate for any of the
classes I've done. However, the certificates for most of them do have meaning,
and should be taken by employers as a sign that someone is likely to have some
competency in the area.

Yes, cheating is possible, so it's not automatic, but you should always be
evaluating someone's actual skills that matter to you anyway. An A in a class
on their college transcript also doesn't guarantee mastery in any way
whatsoever. It's just an indicator that the person may have such.

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dragonwriter
I don't see why this is surprising; MOOCs, for the most part, by design don't
have the kind of accountability mechanism that make them suitable for formal
credit, and which are required for entities accrediting higher education
institutions (including ones that _do_ have credit-granting online programs.)

The push to incorporate credit options involves a variety of solutions that
add those kind of accountability mechanisms on top of (or, provide separate
assessments in addition to) MOOCs, and evaluating support for credit for those
kind of programs isn't something you can reasonably do by asking anyone (MOOC
instructors or not) whether existing pure-MOOC students deserve credit.

And, anyway, knowledge is useful without certification.

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mark_l_watson
Well, even after completing 7 Coursera classes, I agree. Not the same as being
on campus.

One huge difference is that most Coursera classes let you keep submitting
homework and taking tests until you are happy with your score. I got a 99.5%
score in Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class by repeating work until I was
happy with my score and comfortable with the material. If my score had been my
first attempts, my class score would have been lower, and I would not have
learned as much.

