

Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Some-Elite-Colleges-Give/125998/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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ugh
Colleges are selling degrees, not courses. Putting “I watched a lecture on
OCW” in your CV won’t get you anywhere [0], that’s why colleges are not the
least bit threatened by it. (Those videos could be a source of additional
income but colleges luckily decided against that, probably because the market
for course videos with a price but without a degree is rather small.)

[0] Even if watching the lecture online would have the same effect as
attending it in person it still wouldn’t get you anywhere. Anybody can (and
indeed should) claim they watched an online lecture, it’s simple game theory.
Degrees provide verifiable proof, at least to some extent.

Edit: Oh, by the way, a startup could start administering tests and awarding
degrees based on free online course material. It could theoretically provide
similar proof like a real degree at a much lower price. That could be a
threatening scenario for colleges but it is also unlikely because the barriers
are enormous. Degrees are worthless without reputation (and the startup would
have no reputation), there are probably considerable legal problems with this
idea and colleges would probably start pulling their free videos pretty
quickly.

~~~
mbesto
...And degrees are essentially ways of reducing the responsibility of a
manager to make a hiring decision. It's the same concept as the CIO who
chooses IBM because he can't get fired for it.

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sudont
A parable through a former co-worker who went to SVA for design and got a few
AIGA awards:

I asked him, what made SVA special, since you could get everything you needed
to train online. All of his professors wrote blogs and published books on the
subject. Were the people there just better?

No, he said, it was the fact that the professors there took the time to teach
a course that was timely and relevant, and worked with each individual student
to further their goals, while also recognizing their individual talents. They
wouldn’t lead someone down the wrong path. Furthermore, in this atmosphere of
work, everyone strove harder.

So, I’d say these materials are just the base building blocks you could find
anywhere. Sure, they’re top shelf, but the real benefit of MIT is the campus
itself. An auto-diadect would have no problem parsing any materials, but
somebody with that type of intellectual tenacity probably doesn’t need a
degree except for professional licensing. Everybody else still needs the
professor, which this doesn’t provide. It’s like Apple open-sourcing Darwin,
WebKit and LLVM, but keeping all the important UI stuff proprietary.

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wmobit
Apple didn't open source LLVM. It started independently of Apple. Same with
WebKit; it was KHTML.

~~~
Locke1689
Playing semantics isn't important. Webkit is a fork of KHTML and Apple (and
now Google) did most of the work to get it where it is today. LLVM was a
research project whose author went to Apple to turn it into an actual product.
Clang, meanwhile, was indeed developed and open sourced by Apple.

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iwwr
They are giving away the open-source version, but for technical support you
have to buy a license.

~~~
Gibbon
Or a more generalized version is "Give away your ideas, sell the system."

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jeffreymcmanus
The reason is simple; a recorded video of a lecture is very different than a
"college course". You typically don't have access to the instructor, class
discussion, assignments, and evaluation of your work.

This kind of namespace pollution is a significant problem in online education;
it's hindering adoption of online learning because students don't understand
what's meant by "online class". Most people think it's something like MIT
OpenCourseWare or iTunes U, which have interesting content, but aren't what
any reasonable person would characterize as a "class".

~~~
krakensden
> The reason is simple; a recorded video of a lecture is very different than a
> "college course". You typically don't have access to the instructor, class
> discussion, assignments, and evaluation of your work.

Doesn't seem like a big deal. Most professors never have visitors during their
office hours, most discussions I've attended have approximately zero
unprompted participation. Also, OCW at least often has assignments. So really
what you're missing is tests- not a $30,000 a year problem.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
You never asked a single question during any of your college courses? Really.

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batterseapower
The cynic in me says that elite colleges understand that the largest value
they add is the prestige you obtain from having one on your CV.

That is what they are selling, not education - so there's really no
contradiction in giving the education away for free.

~~~
damoncali
Yup. When MIT released their courses, I eagerly checked them out, hoping to
see what I missed at my big state school. Turns out I missed nothing. The
courses were in many cases _less_ rigorous than the ones I took. They were
utterly unremarkable. Yet everyone I know who actually went to MIT loves the
place. The magic just isn't in he courses you take.

I'll give them more than prestige, but academic superiority? No way.

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ericd
A big part of it is that the people at MIT are rigorously prescreened, and
many courses/tests are graded on a curve, with the cutoff for an A being .5-1
std. deviation above the mean score in many classes. By competing with
basically only above-average people, it means that it's relatively harder to
get good grades than at many schools, even if the material is the same.

But yeah, another big benefit is just being able to interact with so many
great people.

~~~
damoncali
I don't know. I've _never_ been asked what my grades were in any professional
situation. Ever. Not in engineering, not in business (post MBA), and certainly
not as an entrepreneur. And I didn't have the luxury of going to a school
where there was an excuse for my lackluster GPA. I think they're selling two
things:

1\. prestige 2\. community

~~~
ericd
Really? Every job I applied to out of school (software) asked for my GPA, and
many of the internships (quantitative finance) for my SATs. Of course it
becomes less important a few years out, so I hope you're not talking about
that.

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ikuygtyuiouy
Those answer explain HOW they can afford to put them online - not why they
should.

The answer is Brand Recognition. MIT isn't competing with the places people
would have gone to if they couldn't read this stuff online - it's competing
with Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, Dartmouth. It could outbid them for better
teachers, it could hire famous noble prize winners, it could publish important
scientific papers.

Or it could associate MIT with computer science lectures in the minds of
potential students, future hirers of future students and the world in general.

Oxford published the "Oxford English Dictionary" more than a century ago -
rather than keeping the secrets of what words meant for it's students - and
150 years later it's still paying off in selling English language courses in
China.

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andresmh
Education is as much about content as it is about the social experience.
Putting videos of the lectures online is a great way of distributing content,
but just like books, it is not enough. The experience of going to a class with
other people and collaborate on projects together has not yet been fully
replicated online. There are some nice initial attempts at doing that such as
openstudy.com, curiousreef.com and to some extent scratch.mit.edu (disclaimer:
I created that website). It might be that we will always feel the need of
face-to-face interaction for our learning experiences, but you could imagine a
nice combination of meetup.com + some online social space + content. As for
reputation, I think things like this ([http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-
for-technical-recruit...](http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-
technical-recruiters-best-stackoverflow-users-handed-over/)) point out future
directions.

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hugh3
The examinations are what you're _really_ paying for. You can sit through as
many hours of lectures as you like, but you can't prove to others _or
yourself_ that you actually understand it until you've sat and passed a set of
examinations on the material.

I'd be interested to know whether there's anyone out there successfully
teaching themselves stuff from these online lectures. I've tried watching a
few on various occasions, but all I learned was something I used to know as an
undergrad but have forgotten: lectures are generally pretty damn boring.

I wonder whether a _recorded_ lecture is actually a better way to learn
something than a book. I suspect that the best possible lecture is better than
the best possible book, but the average book is better than the average
lecture.

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ezy
Why can't you construct or find your own examinations? They are, after all,
just a set of questions. In fact, even in school, this is the way I learned...
You write down questions, put the materials (far) away and work on it until
you get an answer in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm with you on the lectures. I did actually learn a few things, but like
actual schooling, I don't think you get much from just sitting and watching --
you have to work through it.

I think the combination of the written materials, an explanation (lecture or
just another more casually written piece) and most importantly application of
the knowledge is how one learns (or how _I_ best learn). You can do that
outside of a schooling setting.

Assuming your goal is not to be an academic, I think formal schooling is good
for (a) the formal degree (b) access to resources you may not have access to
normally and perhaps (c) access to a real human who knows their stuff --
_assuming_ they are interested in talking with you -- which is not a forgone
conclusion in a lot of schools.

I don't think it is or was ever necessary to learn a topic you want to learn,
however -- it even become and expert in it.

~~~
qq66
You can find your own examination, it's called the GRE. You could self-study
and then prove its effectiveness with the GRE.

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laurasbadideas
I think that the college experience includes a lot of interaction and feedback
that you can't get by reading lecture notes or watching videos online. You do
problem sets and write research papers and then get back comments on your
individual performance. You take tests and can see what you got right and what
you got wrong. You do lab experiments using equipment that's not available to
you at home. If you study a foreign language, you get critiqued on your
pronunciation.

I think online courseware is a fantastic resource, and I'm very happy it's out
there, but using it is nowhere near the same as attending a university in real
life.

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leogau
Most of us probably go to these sites and browse for interesting Computer
Science/Engineering courses which can be useful but, what do people think
about the value of this for other subjects?

I checked out Open Yale Courses after reading this article and while I was
interested in courses such as "Listening to Music" and "Death", I didn't see
much practical value in them nor would I have the patience to sit through 20+
of these lectures in my free time.

The word "edu-tainment" seems very fitting.

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trevelyan
Because the people producing the materials are being heavily supported by
external grants that more-than cover the costs of producing the materials and
putting them online.

Many government grants in the education field are targeted at institutions of
higher education and it is very difficult if not impossible to get one if you
are not at least affiliated with a university. This is the major reason the
only meaningful innovation in education is happening in the adult-education
market.

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beoba
I think you're confusing the research wing and the education wing of the
modern research university.

Research grants are given to professors/staff to fund specific projects, which
are separate from/in addition to their everyday teaching responsibilities at
the university.

Now, I'm not saying the two funding pools don't ever mix, but they're not the
same.

~~~
trevelyan
Not at all... MIT OpenCourseWare was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. Open Yale was supported by the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation. Google supported Colombia's Digital Knowledge Ventures program
(along with VC partners who planned on selling the branding), and even
AllLearn started with $12 million in funding (source unclear).

And those are just the larger projects mentioned in the article. With Fathom
and AllLearn, the projects folded as soon as the funding ran out.

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mustpax
A degree is more than the sum of course materials for the same reason that Y
Combinator is greater than the sum of all Tuesday night dinner talks.
Experienced mentors, inspiring peers and the stamp of approval act as
multipliers on the knowledge gained through the program.

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kgarten
I believe, in the long run it is added value to their brand. To be able to
charge a lot of money for a degree, it might help to be featured in ITunes ;)
In my opinion, it's very similar to how TED makes their talks public.

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scotty79
Why not? I mean, you don't go to elite college to learn stuff anyway.

