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Comment by ddlatham | Hacker News Reader

72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit ... which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher.

They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course is low.

The issue is one of accountability, not quality. The quality of many of these courses is very high, but there are not yet good mechanisms in place to certify the learning for a student is actually happening, and that is why they shouldn't be accompanied by credit.

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It's also worth noting that most current MOOCs were designed and implemented before there was any chance of getting college credit through their platform. Many of them chose to dilute their content in order to make it more approachable, and not to focus on delivering 1:1 parity with the in-person class.

"The issue is one of accountability, not quality."

The issue is also one of dilution of the institution granting the credit and branding.

If someone is able to take an online course and receive credit they will then be able to infer an affiliation with the institution that will dilute the value of an existing degree from that institution.

This already of course can and does happen (just like locks don't prevent everyone from breaking into your home or office) but opening up the floodgates to people who will most certainly claim and fudge that they attended or are somehow affiliated with top shelf universities is definitely an issue.

Case in point is what happened with the Wharton Evening School. Although the link I provided certainly tells a different spin and story the real reason is that it was trivial to get into the evening school (compared to Penn as a regular undergraduate) and Penn had a bunch of those graduates running around with BBA's as students who graduated from Wharton. (Which of course they did but not of the same caliber as the regular graduates).

http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48/n23/WhartonEve.html

Doesn't surprise me at all. In the race for profit schools are diluting their own brand. Around DC I constantly see advertisements for Harvard/Georgetown/American University/etc Night/Online/Extended Learning classes. There is a big land rush when it comes to "legitimate" online learning institutions. But they are going to seriously dilute the value of their brand in the process. I find it amazing that these schools aren't more hesitant in offering these backdoor ways at getting a Harvard, etc "degree" just for a few extra bucks.

In fact, the article they reference cites that the vast majority of the professors actually think MOOCs are WORTH THE HYPE!

This article is sensationalist for sure.

And they are right. They are many ways to cheat. And there are no ways to prove you didn't.

The system on Coursera (the one I tried) is actually very "relax". You have weeks to do your weekly tests, and weeks to do the final exam. You can edit as much as you want your answers, and you can re-do a test which is usually the same questions but with different answers (and also, when every time you submit a test they tell you what you could have done wrong).

If you wanted to give real credits for that, then you'd have to put a real limit of time to those tests first.

But I like the way it is. We don't learn something for credit anymore. I hate going to a test because that's not what I want to do when I go to university. If you don't get real credit when you pass a course on Coursera, then why would you cheat? You can just learn for the pleasure of learning.

It's not just cheating, it's also the fact that when you have to use automated grading, it's much more difficult to create good tests.

I hope in the future they offer you the option of taking a real test at a testing center, which is graded by a human being.

You missed the point, the idea wasn't to pass a test. The idea was to follow the course for the sake of learning.

As for the option of taking a real test at a testing center, I don't see the point since it would be US only.

If I ever return to school, I'd certainly be willing to consider online courses in combination with testing at an approved location.

If I ever return to school, I'm going to want what I didn't get nearly enough of in my undergraduate degree: in-person access to professors.

I don't want college credit for browsing the web and watching videos. I want coaching, feedback and interaction from people with deep knowledge in their field.

But doing the gruntwork online, and focussing on quality interaction with professors? I can see real-time lecturing dying out: that's time that could be more profitably spent doing the coaching and feedback that as you point out has much greater value.

Exactly, like the flipped classroom: covering the material is through videos, questions and discussions are in person.

@blahedo: True, it doesn't have to be video. Personally I prefer reading to watching a video.

Don't put the cart before the horse: videos are only one way to cover the material, and not always (or even usually) the best one. The people that are strongly pushing videos as an integral component of flipping the classroom are in fact still stuck in a lecture mode---but why use videos of lectures if the complaint about lectures is that they're less efficient than just reading the book? Video is appropriate for some things, but other modalities (such as books, viz software, practice problem engines, etc) are more appropriate for much of the "before you come to class" material.

Sounds like you want apprenticeships and mentors, not professors.

I do think apprenticing needs to come back, big time, to complement a digital learning curriculum for the grunt work. In my undergrad, I'd say 2% of my time was actually professor-engaged, and the rest was assembly line rote work read-the-book-repeat-the-answer.

> Sounds like you want apprenticeships and mentors, not professors.

Sounds like a PhD program where you really are an apprentice and the professor is really a mentor.

What's a credit worth, anyways? Unless its from a top university, it's worth a steaming pile of non-dischargeable student loans and a McJob.

This is pessimistic: anything in the top 50 is good enough for many jobs.

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