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Ben Y. Zhao
Sorry, I am sure there will be others who disagree, but MOOCs are worth very little to me in the process of evaluating MS apps.
This is my personal opinion, but I find the online experience of MOOCs completely lacking, and a far cry from a face to face lecture in even mediocre or 3rd tier schools. Here are a few reasons why I think MOOCs are useless compared to real classes:
1. You learn nothing from your peers. I firmly believe the educational experience is as much about learning from your peers as it is about learning from professors. Schools like Yale and Harvard have great faculty, but I think their greatest attraction is in the quality of classmates you study with. But it's not just Ivy league schools. In any setting, where you can sit and discuss problems, hash over ideas, collaborate on homeworks and projects, you are learning from your peers. Most MOOCs I've seen lacks anything remotely resembling this aspect of learning.
2. There is no "stickiness" in classes. Or put another way, easy come easy go. When you can take any class for free online, you have near zero vested interest in finishing the class, and zero penalty if you drop out. In fact, in most classes (e.g. Coursera), no one even knows that you're not "attending" or participating. If you paid thousands of dollars for the 3 or 4 course credits, you're much likely to finish the class.
3. The variance of the experience is too high. There's simply no forcing function to provide a lower bound/guarantee on the minimum level of material students will learn or take away from a class. Without face to face interactions or significant time invested per student, there's no way to checkup on the student's real progress. One student might engage proactively, and another might simply google the answers just to get through the course (and get whatever accreditation that follows).
4. Too easy to cheat. There is just no foolproof way to ensure that students are actually trying to learn, or that answers to assignments, homeworks are all completed by the actual student. The overhead of checking up on students is just too high and doesn't scale.
So for all these reasons and more, I place 0 value on MOOCs. Prove to me that you've learned something by building a piece of code or system? fine. Publish a paper, great. But a bullet claiming you finished some MOOC means nothing, regardless of it's offered by MIT, Harvard, Stanford or whoever.
Just my $0.02.
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Sorry, I am sure there will be others who disagree, but MOOCs are worth very little to me in the process of evaluating MS apps.
This is my personal opinion, but I find the online experience of MOOCs completely lacking, and a far cry from a face to face lecture in even mediocre or 3rd tier schools. Here are a few reasons why I think MOOCs are useless compared to real classes:
1. You learn nothing from your peers. I firmly believe the educational experience is as much about learning from your peers as it is about learning from professors. Schools like Yale and Harvard have great faculty, but I think their greatest attraction is in the quality of classmates you study with. But it's not just Ivy league schools. In any setting, where you can sit and discuss problems, hash over ideas, collaborate on homeworks and projects, you are learning from your peers. Most MOOCs I've seen lacks anything remotely resembling this aspect of learning.
2. There is no "stickiness" in classes. Or put another way, easy come easy go. When you can take any class for free online, you have near zero vested interest in finishing the class, and zero penalty if you drop out. In fact, in most classes (e.g. Coursera), no one even knows that you're not "attending" or participating. If you paid thousands of dollars for the 3 or 4 course credits, you're much likely to finish the class.
3. The variance of the experience is too high. There's simply no forcing function to provide a lower bound/guarantee on the minimum level of material students will learn or take away from a class. Without face to face interactions or significant time invested per student, there's no way to checkup on the student's real progress. One student might engage proactively, and another might simply google the answers just to get through the course (and get whatever accreditation that follows).
4. Too easy to cheat. There is just no foolproof way to ensure that students are actually trying to learn, or that answers to assignments, homeworks are all completed by the actual student. The overhead of checking up on students is just too high and doesn't scale.
So for all these reasons and more, I place 0 value on MOOCs. Prove to me that you've learned something by building a piece of code or system? fine. Publish a paper, great. But a bullet claiming you finished some MOOC means nothing, regardless of it's offered by MIT, Harvard, Stanford or whoever.
Just my $0.02.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...