Does taking MOOCs help a person add some weight to his application for admission in a US...

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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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Shriram Krishnamurthi

I would.

It would have to be a good course (as determined by institution, professor, or content, but since committees are busy, they likely won't spend much time perusing content, so the other two are the best proxies). The student would have to have actually completed it and done it well. The student would have to demonstrate that they were the ones who did it. It would have to correlate with some other things the student has done (frankly, people would be rather suspicious it if a student at an unheard-of university suddenly aces an MIT course and has no other characteristics that would indicate such abilities). For instance, if you can use what you learned in a MOOC to do something neat, that definitely helps.

In short, as just one component of a comprehensive application portfolio, yes. (It also shows the applicant's desire for self-advancement.) On its own, not really. There is just far too much uncertainty about MOOCs (both the quality of content, and who's actually taking the course) for them to count for much. Be especially aware that at highly competitive universities, when dealing with applicants from unknown sources, the natural instinct of committee members would be to be on alert for cheating and, if in any doubt, not take a risk by admitting the applicant.

Finally, as a special case, if you really shone, you might get extra consideration from a professor whose MOOC you took.[*] I admitted to our master's program a student who did well on a MOOC I taught. I suspect I would never have considered him but for it (and a follow-up research project). He did terrific work at Brown, and last month both graduated and published his second research paper (a really nice piece of work).

[*] However, please do not view this as an invitation to pester the professor to get their attention. You might succeed, in that they will inform their admissions committee, “This person is a royal pain, please make sure you don't admit them”. Professors can usually guess when they're being gamed by a potential applicant. So impress them, don't pester them.

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