What happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT classes
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No, I am in no way going to benefit from this as a murrican. :)
Like the pro bono of lawyers, Senator Ron Wyden(Oregon), the senator attacking PRISM, etc, should legislate all those thousands(?) of language specialists of the NSA and CIA be required to translate MOOC courses for our third world brothers and sisters. All these specialists could learn new subjects too.
Wouldn't that be nice?
I do wonder whether, as the technical content becomes more widely accessible, there'll be
A) A premium put on conscientiousness.
and
B) Whether clubs for specific topics will become more popular.
The second one is very ... odd ... because it would seem to require either a provision for local spaces that isn't currently there (but might be as libraries change) or much better tools for online communities.
However, it's great for schizoid people who may not have the same options that you had.
If we look at one of the main virtues of uni as being the people it lets you meet, then I'd have thought that solitary people wouldn't have much of an advantage from attending a brick and mortar as compared to a correspondence course or similar.
Though I suppose one might argue that access to experts is important, that's - to my mind - a much more dicey proposition.
Do you mean that the nature of university is such that they'll be forced to make friends?
Great. Now the whole world can get indoctrinated into neo-liberal economics and the like, and the educated in all countries can adopt the ideology of the ruiling empire. /s
Now, while this is indeed great for hard sciences, medicine and technology, it's very problematic for ideological and soft courses, from History to Economics to Sociology etc.
It might not be clear, but imagine the inverse: American students getting their sociology knowledge from Pakistani scholars -- with the whole ideological baggage that will carry with respect to the treatment of women, issues of personal freedom, etc.
The same harm works both ways.
The exception, relevant to this thread, would probably be economics departments, but even then, I have the impression that there'd at least be a healthy majority of Keynsians that would strongly object to austerity and support a lot of government interventions. So even there, I think "pro-market and right-wing" would be a stretch.
I don't disagree with the general text of your post, but this is really, really school dependent. I would actually bet it's easier to find non-Keynesian professors.
Kenynesian theory is also a pretty "pro-market" approach when compared to some theories that exist outside the US. Government intervention is generally supposed to be limited to periods of recession.
A puzzling statement. Except if you were to include business and economics among the humanities which Americans do not.
>This is probably because in the USA the universities are private, there's no free, autonomous and statal universities.
All American universities worth considering are either non-profits or state funded, so I do not understand where this idea comes from.
>But if I could choose a place to study humanities, specially economy or social science, I wouldn't choose a north-american university.
American sociologists are notably to the left of the American public.
Or course. My comment was against "learning about" another culture, it was against being educated only in the "other culture's" ways of seeing. Especially if it's a hegemonic culture.
There are lots of cases (in lesser countries) where people that have gone through that return indoctrinated with concepts that belong to the ideology of the country the studied, and often with concepts that reflect it's low opinion on their own country and promote it's interests.
For example, Europeans that have studied economics in the US tend to come back as neo-liberals and wanting to abolish the welfare state etc.
I'm speaking mostly for fields like economics, political sciences, history, diplomacy, etc, not stuff like literary theory (of which noone cares about in either place).
Now why does your content-free comment deserves to be here?
On the other hand, on the internet finding FALSE information is so easy. A lot of times its in a form thats actually easier to consume. Its important to have these courses equally available to help combat dangerous ignorance.
They do also offer e-mail and phone contact with advisors for many courses, and for most courses grades also partially depend on assessment of mandatory assignments 2-4 times during the course.
Of course this comes at a substantially higher cost than these MOOCs seems to do. Presumably there'll be space for some "in between" variations that offers monitoring of just the exams for example.
Of course you can get the contacts elsewhere if you make the effort, but the university system is extremely well placed to bring people together for extended periods of time and put them in situations that encourages bonding, and that provides a lot of value.
Frankly, not taking better advantage of that is what I miss the most about cutting my studies short (I left university to co-found my first company; I went back and completed a MSc via correspondence courses, and it served the purpose of documenting my skills, but it wasn't the same without that daily social interaction with people working on the same things).
MOOCs can probably lift the low end, and make the basic education a commodity, but universities will still serve a lot of other purposes. I could even see "universities" pop up for people to attend to take MOOCs from suppliers with top teachers for the main teaching and "just" offering support services and networking/bonding opportunities around that. E.g. universities have long used books from outside their own university, so it just makes sense for them to make use of other resources, including whole courses, when there are ones available elsewhere where they can't compete on the lectures themselves and focus on their strong points.
This is how the top universities continue to stay on top despite there being only a small difference in the quality of the students studying there, and virtually no difference in course content, compared to those just beneath them in the various rankings.
What about the overall success of http://www.open.ac.uk ? Apparently, distance learning is acknowleged by employers.
Nowadays Coursera is the dominant MOOC platform with some very decent courses, at least on CS/AI/Neuroscience subjects.
Yale is another source of high quality materials, while Berkeley sucks after rewriting its site and removing bunch of old courses, including classic Scheme based CS 61A and courses on Buddhism studies.
The oldest CS61A I found on http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science is spring 2008. It's taught by Brian Harvey and is Scheme-based: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL...
CS61A is one of the best courses I took in college and Brian Harvey was one of the best lecturers I had.
So whatever he uses, I'd say it works.
I doubt we'll see any short term changes, but in places that don't have good access to education (or in places with an education system like Feynman experienced in Brazil) I can't help but wonder what kind of changes the world is going to experience as average global education level skyrockets due to MOOCs.
It is amazing now to see the world buried in programmers (and more being produced with people from Pakistan & etc. in Coursera's Startup Engineering).
More amazing that a lot of really good work is being done.
So how does it graph? Plateau or Vinge-ian take-off?
Is the flocking around software apps appropriate or an over-concentration of human capital?