oliviatamccue

Like anything good, soon some issue may be reported.   Is it human nature?

I am referring to the Massive Open Online Courses where a number of prestigious Universities (Harvard, Berkeley, MIT…) are putting up college courses to the Internet for FREE and for the WORLD audience –  WORLD is the many countries on earth not the WORLD in the world series of North American baseball league.

It paints the vision that when the model matures, the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of education and make it available to many more folks of different backgrounds and cultures.

NOT SO QUICKLY.

Recent reports start to reveal reservations from professors of other universities on the model.  What exactly is the concern?  It mentions the implication to professors, effect on face-to-face education, student honor code, etc… Maybe the real concern is about the CHANGES for those in traditional education.

So for now, the free online courses work well to satisfy those who want to learn; it could be a long road, before it can offer college degree and be considered as a rival to the traditional form of education.  BUT technology tends to have the side effect of causing changes to happen fast, we would see in a few years.

Talking about SIDE EFFECTS…. There are also positive side effects from the online courses.

I completed the “Software-as-a-Service” via EdX.org and am in the last week of “Introduction to Data Science” via coursera.org.   These courses have unofficial enrollment figures in the scale of tens of thousands.

To enable the student to do and submit our finished work, we were given tools like Heroku (for web application deployment); like Tableau (for data analysis), and MapReduce etc…

These tools are free to be used, and honestly, they don’t scale up with a sudden increase of 40,000+ students.

What is the win for the tool providers?

Without any paid professional testers, these companies get many free testers, working hard on the tools, and reporting issues.

Even better – their customer base grows by leaps and bounds through the collaboration with universities and the free online courses; and the students become their advocate if the tool works!

There is something to gain to offer something for FREE!

Posted in About Learning