Comment by rsanders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsanders | Hacker News Reader

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I agree -- but we can't really know about that until the program's run for a while.

I think they made a pretty smart choice starting with a CS degree. The field is notoriously full of extremely talented autodidacts, whether because the material is more amenable to that approach or because those who learn it are more capable of doing so.

In any case, the attitude towards educational background in the field of CS/software engineering is already quite liberal and accepting. So there's less of a prejudice against this program than there would be for an online MS in many other fields. Now they just have to make it work.

Despite other comments about not staking their reputation on this degree -- and I agree that the "Online" part of the title seems like a hedge -- Georgia Tech takes its reputation extremely seriously. Smart people are staking their own personal reputations and careers on this program. This is something new and it may fail, but not because there is any intent to deliver a lesser education.

This is probably going to work like University of Maryland and their MBA program. They have a MBA program at Smith School of Business that is offered at UMD @ College Park which is their primary school. Then there is the MBA from UMUC (University of Maryland University College). Two different types of MBA's (One is officially ranked and the other isn't), but has the University of Maryland name on it. If you are not from the DC Metro area or keep track of this, you could think that a UMUC MBA is the same thing as a MBA from Smith which is a Top 25 program.

This course will not help autodidacts, since a BS is required for enrolling.

This degree program doesn't allow people without a BS to get a graduate degree. I think it's wrong to say that having an entire Masters degree program from a highly respected institution online and accessible to everybody, everywhere for free doesn't help autodidacts.

The biggest impact for those who don't qualify for admission may be in advancing the legitimacy of online education, with or without a degree.

As an employer, the difference between an awarded MS and a certificate of completion in this program is not going to be that substantial to me. I'm going to interview both candidates to determine their level of knowledge and skill, and both indicators communicate the same educational background.

I expect a natural outgrowth of this sort of thing will be students providing access to his/her detailed course records as part of their resume. If I'm interested in hiring developers for machine learning applications, being able to read the code from those standardized, well-known assignments would be tremendously more useful in skill assessment than asking somebody to code FizzBuzz on the whiteboard and "riddle me this, batman: why are manhole covers round?"

The "GitHub account as resume" idea is an interesting trend, but they're not standardized and I don't have time to digest 20 unique projects in 20 different languages on 20 different frameworks to ferret out the non-boilerplate bits which may tell me something about the candidate.

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