Ask HN: Getting a CS "degree" via MIT OpenCourseWare?

They are excellent courses if your primary interest is elec engineering. 6.004 is prob the best course I took, all the lectures are online and course material from 2012. Of course you are missing recitation for many courses and TA access though. The assignments for 6.857 and lecture notes are really good for self learning too. As for a job you would have to prove your skills with a portfolio which is a repository of code you've done and develop for some open source project you are interested in. You might find job offers come to you by being helpful on their dev mailing list and somebody notices.

Scott Young, a blogger, did this (http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/), but not to make himself more attractive to potential employers. He covered the equivalent of a CS degree at MIT in one year, where "covered" means passing. Highly recommend reading about it and watching a few progress videos to get his method down.

Please notice you won't get a degree from MIT OpenCourseWare.

"No registration, no enrollment, and no grades or credits are offered" from http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/

But It is worthing to spend time on online courses now. I have finished some courses on https://www.coursera.org/ and https://www.udemy.com. I can always learn from the best. I finished my Bachelor's degree and Master's degree more than a decade ago. If I were able to access those course at that time, I wouldn't go to schools to waste my time and my parents' and my money. But that's a personal choice.

And I don't think my degrees matter much for job seeking nowadays. You can easily demonstrate your abilities by developing apps or contributing to Open Source projects.

Nobody in the real world cares about open source projects from my personal experience. I realize I won't get a degree, just wondering if people have ever been hired after spending time on something like this.

Define "real-world." Open-source projects are highly relevant in terms of getting exposure and connections. If you contribute to a project used by a company, that can be a big plus, for example. Or if you contribute to a project, you can then probably get internal referrals from other contributors at the companies they work at.

I think that depends on the type of company -- a number of old-school companies would be scared off by open-source contributors. For example, back when I was at Motorola (way before the split, and before Google bought out the cell phone section), part of the employment contract was that anything creative you think of at work or at home) belongs to the company, so technically you couldn't work on any side projects without them owning it. Not that it was legally enforceable or that they ever tried to enforce it...

Also, even today there are a number of companies (esp. in the midwest) that won't let any open source software inside, unless it comes from a paid vendor (like Red Hat).

Read my first sentence.

I work in the corporate world. The reason it's frowned upon is because employers rather see complete projects that you did rather than a bit of random code here and there in an open source project.

"the corporate world" is a pretty large place spanning companies that will hire people based solely upon open source contributions as well as companies that will disqualify people based solely upon open source contributions.

It's a pretty meaningless statement to say "in the real world, no one cares about open source" when your definition of "real world" is one fraction of one fraction of the real world (specific companies within the corporate world).

Ok, so "Real world" -- that definition varies depending on what part of the country (U.S.) you are in (or which country, for that matter). My definition of Real World is the majority of companies that you can work at, in a given region. So for the real world on the West Coast, you are most definitely correct -- you are probably more likely to run into open-source friendly companies. In the Midwest, not quite as much (unless you get into one of the financial trading houses).

Actually, now that I think of it, this may not be a strictly regional thing, except that certain industry types cluster around specific areas. I think it is more if a company sees its software as a competitive advantage, then they are more likely to go out on a limb to try to differentiate themselves. Whereas companies that see software as similar to a phone system, or electricity, they are usually only interested in traditional big-company that-you-can-contractually-blame software. At least that has been my experience around here.

Also, you've inverted my chain of causality.

I don't claim that in order to work at <set A of companies> you should do open source. I only claim that doing open source will help you get a job at <set B of companies>. Those two sets are not the same.

My GitHub profile got me a job interview with Google, is that "real world"?

Oh really? I viewed your github, but have no impression. Why did Google give you an interview? I think you have other profile, not just github.

How sure are you that university is out of the picture? I failed most of high school and then dropped out. Eventually I decided to go to university, where I got a CS degree. I had to take a remedial Math course my first semester that didn't count towards graduation, but overall college was fairly easy and rewarding. I did graduate with student loan debt, which I'm still repaying. I got a job doing programming right after graduation and I've been thriving.

The only thing university admissions required was some kind of high school equivalency and ACT or SAT scores. I took the GED and ACT, and my scores exceeded placement requirements by a huge margin. Your mileage may vary outside of the US.

Are you certain you don't meet admissions requirements for any nearby universities? Have you checked, or are you just assuming?

To the degree it is about a credential, Western Governor's University is a reasonably priced option - http:\\www.wgu.edu

While MIT might offer good courses, they're designed to be tough for a very select group of the best prepared students even with the support resources such as Teaching Assistants and labs and peer students and professors with office hours that are accessible only on campus. Without those, it can only be tougher. In my opinion, tougher to the level that a multi-year project has a low chance of success even for a person of above average motivation and intelligence.

Personally, I think a CS education from an average school will probably better prepare anyone motivated enough to have a chance of completing a full slate of MIT courses as self study. You can always get a graduate degree someplace more selective.

> To the degree it is about a credential, Western Governor's University is a reasonably priced option - http:\\www.wgu.edu

Not if you want a CS degree, which WGU doesn't offer (WGU does offer a variety of IT degrees, which may be an acceptable substiture, or even the preferred option for some people, but its certainly not even remotely the same thing as a CS degree.)

I agree that the difference is important to the degree that the concern is over education rather than about credentials. That's why I also mentioned the value of a CS degree from a less prestigious institution when the student is highly motivated.

But if we're just talking about credentials, then a relevant degree plus experience gives anyone who wants to hire the OP a green light.

> I agree that the difference is important to the degree that the concern is over education rather than about credentials.

The difference is important if the concern is about credentials, too; when the concern is about credentials, then exactly what the degree is in can be very important.

CS and IT mean different things, including (perhaps especially) to people who are evaluating credentials. (In some cases, IT may be preferred, in other cases, CS may be.)

Related to the question here, MITx is offering a MOOC-based certificate (one of edX's inaugual XSeries certificates) in Foundations of Computer Science -- but the first class that is required for the series has already finished.

https://www.edx.org/xseries

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the cheapest path to a degree in the United States is to:

1. make sure your local state university offers cheap tuition to residents

2. make sure they accept credit transfers from community colleges, get it in writing

3. do 1-2 years in community college

4. transfer those to the state university and do the final years there at the cheaper tuition rate

You'd then exit with a solid computer science degree on the cheap. Speaking as someone from outside the USA most of the state universities are highly regarded.

Another option might be a BSc in Computing and Information Systems (does this count as CS to purists? does that matter if you aren't going on to higher studies?) from the University of London, Goldsmiths in this case, for just under 5000 pounds.[1]

However if your experience in the local small college was miserable you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what the real reasons were for not completing there as they will likely apply to anything you do elsewhere. The lowest risk option in that case is to perhaps take some uncredited core CS curriculum from OpenCourseWare, Coursera, Udacity and edX over 2014 and just see how you go. Then, if it works out, you will then be in a position to blitz a credited distance, community/state or online option that might arise in 2015+. The risk, at least in terms of "money on the line", of the community college moving to state university option is fairly low as well.

Finally, as someone with graduate degrees and who is working on a PhD in a different discipline to CompSci, I'd say you shouldn't get too caught up in worrying about degrees if it doesn't match up with you personally. There are reasonable, although often smaller than claimed or imagined, financial and personal benefits from doing a degree though and you should take another shot, or two, at it to make sure it's not for you (so long as the risk is low regarding debt, there is virtually no risk in watching lectures and reading textbooks as the time spent won't be wasted).

[1]http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/g... The courses seem perhaps a tad dry but it seems to cover the core mathematics, statistics, databases, algorithms and has some nice looking electives.

However if your experience in the local small college was miserable you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what the real reasons were for not completing there as they will likely apply to anything you do elsewhere.

It was low level introductory programming like basic C, PHP, navigating the UNIX filesystem, writing bash scripts, some simple database work. It's stuff I've already done before and didn't find challenging, wasn't worth it.

I'm not in the States and England is out of the question as well.

Well the UoL one is done by distance and is theoretically open to anyone who can make it to their exam centers (~30 across Canada), not just those resident in the UK.

Or you could take the foundations of comp sci from edX[1] and/or the credited Coursera courses[2](you won't be getting a CS degree without at least a reasonable amount of maths and stats) with a view to 1) completing a degree mostly that way over the next few years as more like them become available with a finishing year or two somewhere that accepts the credits, or 2) using just a few of those courses and a reference/letter to gain mature entry to UoT (bypassing highschool requirements) or something like that with the understanding being that if you can motivate yourself to complete them, then you will be able to complete UoT and it will therefore be worth the money in increased earning capacity.

[1]https://www.edx.org/xseries

[2]http://blog.coursera.org/post/42486198362/five-courses-recei...

Oh awesome, UoL sounds like a potential option then. Thanks.

There is an even cheaper way to do it, that I'm AMAZED doesn't get more attention. Credit by exam.

The two options I used, that covered one year of school for me, in about 4 months... CLEP and DANTES.

CLEP - http://clep.collegeboard.org DANTES - http://getcollegecredit.com

the tl;dr version: take exam on $SUBJECT, pass exam, get credit.

The fine print:

a. the exams cost money, typically $100 - 150

b. there is typically a limit on how many credit-by-exam credits a receiving institution will accept (for me, it was 30 semester hours, or 1 year's worth) - for how many and which credits you can get - you need to research with the receiving institution!!!

c. Usually, these are NOT easy exams, but the margin for passing exams varies, but typically it's a ridiculously low margin, like 50-60%. I guess the rationale is that the average college student retains only 50-60% of the material they were taught, at best. (my conjecture, not fact!)

TOTALLY doable!!!

This is great, and something I looked into when I was pursuing my bachelors, but it's important to note this is something ONLY worth considering after finishing a relevant udacity/mit course, and then making sure the syllabus matches up with that of the local university's teacher's that will be administering the exam.

Also, at my school, which was a mediocre local university, I believe you still needed 70% to pass an examination for accreditation.

Speaking as a hiring manager, I would hire a person with such a "degree." Even better if some open source experience, contract experience, sysadmin experience, etc.

Depends on location. Markets in SF and NY particularly are very strong. Maybe don't try this in Tennessee.

I am pretty sure (depending on what company you want to work for), "degrees" and "education" doesn't matter anymore.

If you can do several passion projects of your own, no GOOD employer would discredit you.

But I recommend, double down. Create something you love (no business intention behind it) while taking the MIT course.

I have a friend who got Red Heat accreditation and got a string of jobs based on it. Now he is in SF doing very well for him self. He had nothing but HS degree.

But I am very interested what others think on this topic as well, so please up vote.