Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>'A University's Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers'

At glance, most coverage of this is a bit misleading as it leaves out a few key points.

* It's not offering CSU credit so much as transfer credits to be applied toward CSU. That's great if I am already attending or plan to attend a school in the CSU system, but it's roundabout at best and useless (in terms of credit) at worst if I'm not.

* You're required to complete a proctored test via Pearson after completing the MOOC for a certification in order to receive those credits - another complication.

* I wondered why I don't recall hearing about this - CSU announced this option in September 2012, through Udacity. Udacity was only a bit over a year old at that point while EdX and Coursera were still in their infancy, 4 and 5 months respectively. There's much greater awareness of MOOCs today and moving forward.

It's purely anecdotal, but my estimation is that a majority of serious (make an effort to complete and pass the course) MITx students would have interest in a credit option.

Thanks for pointing out the requirement for the Pearson certification - I didn't see that mentioned in the article at all!

Also, an interesting point about not hearing about it. It doesn't seem like it's in the best interest of the school - the article mentions that 'The council has not yet advertised its services directly to MOOC students'.

>'The council has not yet advertised its services directly to MOOC students'.

Thank you for pointing this out.

While I'm all about Hanlon's Razor some of this just feels so shady.

In the case of the CSU offering there no direct advertisement, but a slew of articles pointing out that no one signed up.

Looking a bit further I found that my own local University system where I'm registered as a CS major started offering roughly the same deal last fall [1].

There was no announcement and even now I can't find a single thing about the specifics on either site. This is while there's an ongoing study by the Gates foundation on the effectiveness of this sort of program.

Could it be that these institutions want to give the impression that no one wants the $100 MOOC alternatives to their $800-1500 courses?

1: http://technical.ly/baltimore/2013/09/05/umuc-to-offer-credi...

Thanks for pointing these out. The perception in the MOOC community is really not much more nuanced than the headline, so it might be scaring others off from making a big credit push.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com