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.
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)?
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.