OSSU: Path to a free, self-taught education in computer science
github.com
github.com
I'm not surprised, but still, Bush, Licklider, Engelbart, Weiser, Kay, Victor etc. are all about HCI...
Understanding the user beyond tactics of engagement and viral loops is a valuable skill.
With the sharding of software developers into frontend and backend developers, perhaps the HCI through the software layers is falling thru the cracks.
I am not sure learning HCI helps with computer science itself most of which is really applied math.
As someone with a deep love of learning and knowledge, I am delighted that this exists.
Credentials historically are built in the brand of the institution, a clock which is starting to tick.
Would you care for the credential of an institution if it goes out of business in the next 3-5 years?
Well... yes. If they were all open programs then that may well be true. Of course there's value in diversity. But it does seem like a massive waste of resources that we have students paying thousands for tuition they could get much cheaper if it was shared around more widely.
> Would you care for the credential of an institution if it goes out of business in the next 3-5 years?
That depends entirely on whether my credential was still accepted beyond that point. But in any case, I don't see why a new credentialing organisation should last any less long than an older one.
Obvious solution would be decoupling teaching and certification. Actually, having both performed by the same institutions seems like a conflict of interest.
Germany has apprenticeships as far as I am aware, I don't know enough about it though.
edit: Yes! Having certification and teaching done by one organisation _IS_ a huge conflict of interest. Splitting these up without changing the fundamentals (courses and exams/assignments) woudln't do much to fix this I think as you'd either have clumsy evaluations or organisations that just help each other out in order to gain from a slightly different system.
Similar programs exist at Google, Lyft, and a few other tech companies.
Apprenti, the non-profit that administers the AWS apprenticeship, is doing pretty great work getting people into tech form non-traditional roles.
A college degree is more like a certificate of completion than a certification of skill or competentcy. It says that the holder passed the minimum requirements for the degree.
Post-degree certifications like CPA, medical boards, engineer, bar exam are already administered by independent organizations.
I can understand if most of the resentment about these degreeless learning paths comes from people with 6-figure student loans
If you want to just learn, there are no practical barriers for most people.
While I agree with the above that having them under the same roof can cause a conflict of interest. But we also know for a fact that having them decoupled can cause serious problems as well. For one you end up with brain dumps that study for the cert and not for the subject matter. We see this for MCSE as much as the SAT.
While that can happen with a university as well, it doesn't always and is a useful measure of the institution's quality.
> we do pretty much give diplomas to anything with a pulse
What's the metric for being the most educated nation? 'Cause ya know if it's "most diplomas per capita" or something and you freely give them out... we might want to rethink that lol.
Just something to think about I guess
The metric OECD uses.
Seems like a pretty fair assumption given that is the topic of discussion.
> since degree != education.
Quite true, but as everyone gains an education every minute of their lives, the most educated will be the oldest population. I'm not sure that's particularly useful information.
In the United States, this certification happens at the institutional level. Universities are either accredited by either a regional body (good) or a national body (not so good). The accreditation process requires demonstrating that you have competent faculty, that these faculty have designed a reasonable curriculum from each of your degree programs, that the courses taught as part of that curriculum cover appropriate material, and that students are at least nominally assessed.
In addition to accreditation, there's also a reputation effect among employers. We know which of the universities in our region have strong CS programs, and which ones are not so strong. And there's a reason that employers prefer CS students from places like CMU/MIT/Stanford/Berkley/UIUC/etc. The names aren't just names -- those institutions have exceptional CS programs. I'm sure a student slips through the cracks here or there, but the median student from those institutions is almost certainly going to at least have a good background in CS.
> But we also know for a fact that having them decoupled can cause serious problems as well. For one you end up with brain dumps that study for the cert and not for the subject matter. We see this for MCSE as much as the SAT.
Frankly, I think the decouple-and-test model is substantially worse than the accreditation model. Have you seen the contents of the Computer Science subject area GRE? It's from the 1980s. The AP CS exam and model curricula aren't that much better -- definitely not what I would expect out of a CS 1 student at any decent university. In fact, I can't think of a single formal exam in CS that's actually a decent signal of even basic CS knowledge, let alone engineering skill.
Yes, I'm aware of accreditation and the process. I've served on a department advisory board for about 5 years now and have seen the process via ABET first hand. I hate to disappoint you, but these accreditation agencies are box-checkers and they don't do too much other than publish some guidelines and look at course material. The university could lose the accreditation and teach the same stuff and nothing would really change for students - in a vacuum student outcomes would be exactly the same except that as you mention...
> there's also a reputation effect among employers.
This has not much to do with accreditation. CMU, MIT, Stanford, etc... could lose their accreditation and nothing would change for the university. Their reputation is far stronger than the governing body. The exceptional programs that are there exist without consideration to ABET. It's just not meaningful. If they said "we are no longer complying with ABET" (at least for engineering) it would discredit ABET and not the university. Not all universities transcend this, but I'd say most brand name ones do (Ohio State, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, etc.). I'd bet a survey of employers and students would show very little knowledge of the existence of many of these accreditation bodies. It's just a battle not worth fighting professors over, and the accreditation bodies don't look too hard because why kill the golden goose? Everybody just winks at each other. I guess think about accreditation bodies as insurance.
Anyway, that's just my take on these accreditation bodies. I'm sure some are better and some are worse.
But my main point was that education itself is decoupled from certification. The employers (as you mentioned) care about certification, but that is the degree from the prestigious university, not whether ABET says that the curriculum meets some standard. You can learn computer science or any other topic to a high degree of proficiency, but employers still care about the certification. So you might as well just get the certification if you care about education as a means to a job.
> The university could lose the accreditation and teach the same stuff and nothing would really change for students - in a vacuum student outcomes would be exactly the same except that as you mention...
This is definitely not true of regional accreditation -- a degree from an unaccredited institution isn't worth the paper it's printed on in many fields. Also, as you point out, it's a low bar. If a university is accredited it may or may not do a good job at education/assessment. But a university that loses regional accreditation is almost certainly doing a horrible job at both.
ABET is a bit different -- lots of quality programs aren't ABET accredited. But still, in traditional Engineering fields, losing ABET accreditation can also have a material effect on students' outcomes (can you even sit for the PE exam without an ABET accredited degree?)
> these accreditation agencies are box-checkers and they don't do too much other than publish some guidelines and look at course material.
Yes, there's no silver bullet and the map is never the territory. The only alternative I'm aware of is standardized exams, which, well, look at US K12 or the CS GRE.
>> there's also a reputation effect among employers.
> This has not much to do with accreditation.
Right, they are two separate things but both effect institutional behavior.
> But my main point was that education itself is decoupled from certification. The employers (as you mentioned) care about certification, but that is the degree from the prestigious university, not whether ABET says that the curriculum meets some standard. You can learn computer science or any other topic to a high degree of proficiency, but employers still care about the certification. So you might as well just get the certification if you care about education as a means to a job.
This we agree on.
The efficient answer is a certification that employers will accept, and various competing educational pathways. And if your educational pathway was reading Byte Magazines that you found in your uncle's attic, and you actually learned enough to pass the certification, well, that's probably not the most efficient educational path, but if it worked for you, congratulations. You're certified.
I don't see a problem here that needs fixing. It seems you are conflating certification with degree.
Competition from open learning paths should make paid degree programs adapt to be more competitive. Open, self paced learning isn't for everyone, but it's still awesome to see the open access to this knowledge with little to no economic barriers to entry.
Sure, you can get certified by Amazon or Google or Microsoft in their own proprietary tech stack, and you can get a degree from an accredited university, but there's no formal body of software engineers who've outlined a process by which you can earn your engineering stamp.
The issue would be getting past the automated CV checkers or recruiters that will throw out any applicants that don't have a certain grade
Something more specialist, they might give more time to consider your application
That’s rich considering how quickly (and aggressively) software developers dismiss all other forms of credentials (licensing, certifications, advanced degrees), especially on HN.
There are a lot of software engineers who don't have any kind of certification, including a degree. Many of us at least know such people, even if we aren't that person ourselves. We're kind of skeptical of anything that says "that person isn't qualified to do this work".
Many other software engineers (I say "other", but it's not a completely disjoint set) see too many people show up at interviews (or even on the job) who can't program. Like, can't program at all. They'd like some way to weed them out.
And then some other people look at this program from a purely selfish point of view, and say "Learning some stuff might help my career, but I can do that without this program. But learning some stuff with a certification would help my career more..."
Communication is critical but can lead to non-tech people talking about tech, too. Need both.
Theres nothing about self-directed learning that says one couldn’t do it on the job, or doing other things. Work integrated learning one example.
Conversely, suffering group work in post secondary doesn’t always guarantee excellent communication skills. It’s another way (for the few) to learn to work with people who might not be able to work with each other. There is lots of self directed learning needed in post secondary too, only they call it learning how to think.
This program in question appears to be part time.. which leaves time to not be alone at home and instead be scrolling the world through a little window.
Most likely, the self-taught person is also doing some other job, etc as well. So, he is managing a tougher-than-normal schedule, and communication/planning comes into play for sure.
However in my experience such organizations are really a waste of time if they insist on a degree for people with a lot of experience, every internal promotion will have similar and sometimes unreachable barriers.
They have a competency based model where if you can demonstrate competency by passing the test and/or completing the project you can be done with the class, whether that takes you 3 days or 3 months.
You also play a flat rate for the semester and complete as many classes as you want at a time.
I did it I loved it, I'd been in the field and was able to breeze through some of my courses while the ones I wasn't familiar with helped me.
They also have a lot of classes that the test is an industry cert, so it's a cheap way to get some certs under your belt as well.
Oooh, I did not know that. So you could figure out what classes you want, study for them on your own, then pay for one semester and pass all the tests? If you've got the discipline to study with no feedback for a year or two, that could be a really inexpensive way to get a degree...
I got my degree in 18 months, plus one semester of a local college prior. But yes if you've got the discipline and motivation you can get your entire degree in 6 months for about 4 grand.
It really is the way of the future in my mind.
People are going to consider "online course just for the paper" to be somewhat of a scam.
So, just for the paper, no.
OSSU: A path to a free self-taught education in computer science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21062799 - Sept 2019 (172 comments)
Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16035839 - Dec 2017 (66 comments)
So the idea is to get your foot in whatever door you can at that time, and climb when you can.
This is like the "boomer handshake" meme. Nowadays you need a degree.
Admittedly, this was at a company with about 500 employees and 1 part-time HR person (who quit 6 months later and wasn't replaced).
I've been asked about my education in initial recruiter screens maybe 10% of the time, and its come up later down the line in interviews maybe 20% of the time. I've never had it clearly and obviously preclude me from moving forward (as in obviously dropped from consideration after that conversation).
I've found most people who ask to be curious, but keen to move on and talk about my experience. It might be different at the entry level.
Once you're in the interview, it's more about real experience and knowledge. I think nobody cares whether you got your experience from school or from somewhere else.
2. The problem isn't the interview, people can show their knowledge in an interview. Problem is getting the interview.
That said, without the CS education (formal or otherwise) some fields of work will be inaccessible but I think these are in the minority.
This makes it hard to recommend to others.
I don't understand this trend.
Network effect. I don't like it neither. Many open source projects adopt Discord now, making it harder to be part of their community if you want to avoid non-free software / closed networks. (What next? Open source projects hosted on a non-free social network? /s)
From the outside, this is an impressive phenomenon, where in a very short time you notice everybody suddenly going to Discord and you don't understand what's happening / what's the deal.
But since nobody cares, it's not a problem.
Do they need to? The point wasn't "they falsely advertise encryption" The point was "they do not respect privacy"
Their advertising is irrelevant.
In fact, the only real difference I see between Discord and an IRC server is that Discord forces you to create an account and associates your messages with it. But, so does Github, and nobody complains about needing a Github account to contribute to FOSS projects.
Nearly every popular messaging service these days offers end-to-end encryption. I have no idea what you're talking about when you say they "are not any more privacy averse than any other messaging service"
When you're worse off, privacy-wise than a Facebook owned messenger, you're not doing too hot.
I found a good write up of popular and e2e messengers for you to check out. https://getstream.io/blog/most-secure-messaging-apps/
Again, if you want to revise your claim to say that they're not particularly privacy-focused, then, sure, I agree with that. But, to argue that they're privacy averse (meaning they hate user privacy and don't want anybody to have it), I don't see it, and it's not been proven here.
Pro tip: try arguing the point you're actually trying to make.
So one of their advertised selling points is privacy violating. Also they don't have privacy features that many of their competitors do.
Those two data points seem to show privacy aversion to me.
Of course people do, that's why there are other platforms and self-hosted solutions. Github is antithetical to the idea of free open source, especially now that it's been "acquired" by Microsoft.
Unfortunately it's pretty worthless without a paper degree. It's cool that Finland is now having open online registration for Finnish citizens to do online courses like https://fullstackopen.com/en/
It's a shame something like that doesn't exist in every country.
I personally did complete about six months worth of studies while still in the secondary education.
Lightyears ahead of the rest of Europe.
Some of these comments remind me of an argument in "The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan that degrees are more about signalling than anything else nowadays.
If you have two candidates applying for a job. One audited MIT classes for four years completing all problem sets but not receiving any credits. The other cheated and dragged their way to a low-GPA degree but has the qualification. Who would be more likely to get a job offer?
I’ve attempted to look into it a few times, but it seems pretty clear they don’t want me. From the prohibitive costs, to the riding, bureaucratic admission where my high school disciplinary record is more important than my resume and where I’m a “dependent” despite what my tax returns have said for the last several years, it’s clear that universities are mostly interested in gullible HS seniors who’s parents can co-sign for insane loans. In the US at least.
In many countries you can’t work as a traditional engineer without the license. To get the license you need to complete the degree, and then do the apprenticeship and exams.
Yes, some exceptions exist, but those are the minority, and they still require formal schooling. For example, [0] outlines requirements for a bridging pilot program in BC, Canada. To be eligible you are required to have a diploma of technology as the minimum level of education. That’s 2 years of study in BC. You’ll still need to learn the remaining 2 years of the engineering curriculum on your own and you’ll need to demonstrate equivalent mastery.
MIT OCW has a lot of material available for the traditional engineering curricula with guides [1].
The licensing body in your region may publish curricula that include example textbooks to acquire the material from. See [2], for example.
However, there are some limitations to what you can learn without having access to the labs. You can learn the mechanics, physics, programming, math calculation as an individual, but that’s not the only thing being taught.
With maker spaces it might be possible to learn some of the manufacturing process courses on your own.
Much of traditional engineering involves looking up details in the specifications and standards documents and “connecting the plumbing” so to speak. There are engineers who are “catalogue engineers” and others who are “spreadsheet engineers”. There is very little “rolling your own” like in software.
But again, why? If it’s for personal education, then the material is out there as I hope I’ve been able to show. But if it’s for professional practice, then going through a formal program of some kind is probably required.
[0] https://www.egbc.ca/Registration/Individual-Registrants/How-...
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mit-curriculum-guide/
[2] https://www.egbc.ca/Registration/Individual-Registrants/How-...
CS is the outlier because the only lab equipment you need is a used laptop or a Raspberry Pi and Internet access.
Granted, computational engineering where you can just simulate the lab has come a long way, but even there, you generally need a lot of compute power if you don't want your simulation of a bridge to take 3 months to run.
Even if it is a side-effect, who cares?
better computer scientist needs interaction with other people, needs to learn to respect their views or at least understand them, evaluate. perhaps needs to meet other scientists. to exchange ideas and approaches. this is what schools and academia is for.
this whole self-taught thing is a time-bomb. we already have too many self-taught engineers, architects and what-nots who can only work with themselves, listen to themselves, and agree to their own designs. not okay.
being good at anything more often than not means also being good in working with people.
even though you can also call yourself better piper or better kiter, doesn't mean you actually are better at anything just like this.
Social skills are very important, cannot be more important in these times. 15+ years in academia, not as researcher, but as teacher, showed one thing - the best learners are those who are best at listening, at interacting with others, not the top-bookshelf-worms. Usually not the top kids, but most usually become top contributors to teams and companies at later point.
Surely now and then an Einstein is born, but we also know of people who were very active in their social interaction without all the academia fuss about it. and academia is one place to find people to interact with. and academia is not only Oxford and MIT where entry level is very hard, nearly impossible.
So all of this is not about academia, rather about being human with humans.
That's nothing to sneer at.
There are lots of people for whom this content is very valuable. Many of those people don't necessarily care about being able to use the title "computer scientist" is totally irrelevant. I have a degree in computer science but I don't call myself a computer scientist.
I don't see the reason to disparage the content because it doesn't come with the title. Maybe I'm missing something you can share?
Is it more efficient if you collaborate with other people with the same goal (e.g. Academia)? Yes.
Is it a necessity to conduct science? Absolutely not; how do you think it was done in the past? Almost all of the early scientists were self-taught individuals.
To take the best reading I can of what your point is: you're saying a pupil will not self-study this course and go into CS academia. I agree with you there.
To me, that seems a poor reason to criticize this course, the content, or people who want to pursue it. There are many reasons to learn undergraduate CS material besides pursuing academia (again, self as an easy example: CS -> SWE). I don't feel there was anything in my degree which could not have been self-studied with enough tenacity.
If it's about joining academia, I get your point. Otherwise, really unsure why you're fixated on the title. Anyone can absolutely self study physics the same as computer science, and use that knowledge to advance their understanding in other fields, or hobbies, or just pursue knowledge for the satisfaction. Those all seem worthwhile to me :)
The former needs paper and pencil. The latter requires expensive equipment to prove your theories. At best you can learn theoretical physics by yourself and formulate some hypotheses. Proving them might often be a completely different matter.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's book The Formula is kind of about this. While nothing would stop an individual from publishing such a paper, outside a major company or university setting an individual wouldn't have the network to notice the paper basically.