Comment by cdnsteve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdnsteve | Hacker News Reader

Educational institutions needs to get with the times. Their business models aren't what they use to be. Governments have issued major cutbacks in funding here in Canada (I'm sure elsewhere in the world). These Universities are already largely funded by donations. They need to stop throwing all their money in buildings and start putting it into their technology stack online.

I do like the idea of modular degree's. Most are already fairly modular where you can pick and choose a variety of courses with a set of core required courses. The problem is they can't figure out how to do it online.

There is absolutely no reason why these Universities don't offer complete degree's online. Many offer a handful of starter/intro courses over correspondence but that's about it. They don't need to turn into MOOC's, they just need to offer quality online education - not 10 year old material. If they offer it, people will take their programs.

The only University in Canada doing complete online degrees right now is Athabasca. And some of the material is horridly out of date (COMP 268). Business opportunity? Hello?

> they just need to offer quality online education - not 10 year old material.

Quality and freshness are orthogonal, at least at the undergrad level. I earned an electrical engineering degree a couple of years ago. I also collect older texts in my areas of interest. Using only material from the late-1950s I could have passed my classes. Using material from the mid-1970's, aced them. (If you are curious, the reason for the difference is the development of the MOSFET.)

This is not to say that the material taught was 40 years old. Rather that 40 years ago the body of core knowledge hit what could be reasonably taught in a four-year time span. None of this "old" material has been proven wrong (at least at the scales undergrads deal with). The material won't need revising until either the silicon transistor goes the way of the vacuum tube or Laplace transforms are part of the standard high school education.

Indeed. For chemistry, for the basic knowledge you could go back quite a bit further, probably to the 1930's when quantum mechanics was applied to it. More recent for some of the lab work, there are some really neat analytical toys to play with.

On the other hand, anything touching on biology, including to some degree biochemistry, needs to be up to date. Very complicated systems about which we're continuing to learn major things all the time. At the other end, at least for MIT's core science requirements, physics of the 19th century are fine (mechanics and E&M).

In terms of offering entire degree online, I'm not sure existing universities have a substantial advantage that makes it important they do it as opposed to some new startup. OTOH, using online/digital resources in innovative ways to do what they do better is something which universities are uniquely positioned to explore.

These "zero to entry level developer in x months" startups seem to be getting results. Imagine an alternative semester, summer term, using MOOC technology, etc. They have the students. They have the teachers. There is a lot of tech out there waiting for good opportunities to apply itself to. All that's needed is some initiative and some stones.

Exactly - this is the first thing I thought of when I read this. Why not start by getting your existing degree programs online? Then they try breaking up into modules, experimenting with different teaching methods, etc.

Affiliated with Georgia Tech, Udacity offers online master computer science degree. They've mentioned that the graduated certificate would be same as those onsite students'. If that works well, I think more and more university will offers degrees via Moocs

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