Posted on 08/30/2013 7:43:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Georgia Institute of Technology rocked the higher education world when it announced plans to offer a fully online master’s degree in computer science for roughly one-seventh the price of its on-campus equivalent – less than $7,000. The project is powered by a joint venture with Udacity, an online higher-education course provider that stands to earn 40 percent of the tuition revenues. The AT&T Corporation, which is providing two-thirds of the estimated ramp-up costs, expects to funnel existing employees through the program and recruit new ones at the back-end of it.
Reaction to the news has been mixed.
Online education advocates are excited about what they see as an opportunity for broad access to substantially more affordable higher learning.
Others worry that the wholesale democratization of higher education will lead to deteriorating outcomes and the diluted quality of advanced degrees—particularly as a larger number of students are attracted to the courses. There is also a fair amount of academic carping about the competition—how joint ventures such as this will hijack resources that might otherwise be used to develop and deliver the staff’s own groundbreaking programs.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Without campus orientation week, where will these poor deprived students go to learn how to celebrate sodomy, Leninism, wind power, and abortion?
An engineer friend of mine said that the only thing his engineering degree got him was in the door of the job.
That is pretty important....lol.
Those that can get the job done will get paid better than those that just have a piece of paper.
Lots of degrees are used to get past the gatekeepers at HR who require a degree, but don't know or care about the actual skillsets of a candidate.
/johnny
I agree that computer folks are a bit different. I mean Gates did not graduate from Harvard and still find success, but those are very far and few between. It is like being a football player or basketball player at 13 and putting your entire life into only to find out that only a very small percentage actually make it. A VERY VERY small percentage of people with little education are going to be successful at least like Gates.
How would you know a damned thing about serious employers. You work for the government.
Nuff said.
The entire world has changed since 2000 my friend. We have learned more new stuff about everything from smart phones to oil since 2000 than we had ever learned in all of world history before then. Stay in the dark if you want. You’ll never lose your government cubicle anyway. We’ll keep paying for your drone hood.
On line has replaced the entire travel agency industry, taking over insurance, purchasing, licensing, etc.....and yes, Big Education is going to be revolutionized too.
Again, government won’t, and you won’t, but you’ll be paid for. You are inside the wagon riding, not outside pushing....and your comments about business and economics over years proves it.
You ignorantly and naively conflate education with what goes on inside certain buidling with certain govt seals of approval. How freakin closed minded of you. Education is great. Organized education is corrupt and a scam.
A very very small percentage of people with advanced degrees are going to be successful like Gates.
Your logic is fundamentally flawed.
/johnny
I have since heard other stories like the one I witnessed.
So I've got to ask, will programs like Georgia's have safeguards in place to prevent cheating? A simple safeguard would be to require participants to report to a secure location with valid ID to take exams. Do the work on-line, but take the exams in person.
Somehow I think universities won't bother to do that. And the result will be that, eventually, all on-line degrees will be suspect.
bflr
Brick and mortar degrees are also suspect because people don't show up for class and pay others to test for them now.
I had a small sideline business writing term papers when I lived near a university.
Brick and mortar ain't majikal.
/johnny
In which case, they will have caught up to big education degrees of today......
Preach it bros....who knew so many Freepers had missed the last 20 years of horror stories from big education....all the way from Atlanta elemtary schools to the Iviest of the Ivy.
And who knew so many freepers had no creativity or ability to see the big picture and think outside the box. They’re sitting there on a keyboard attached to a device...that has made brick and mortar totally irrelevant to information gathering or deciminating....and they totally miss it....WHOOSH right by them....
.......the result is do you want to be successful in life or not.
Another funny one. I went to COBOL school in 1883. Since then I’ve been a programmer, a DBA, a Project Manager and a Business Analyst. My income has been in six figures since around 1996.
No college whatsoever. College has its place, but it is not a requirement by any stretch of the imagination. And in a very real way it is really just a crutch for those that need it. It’s why the likes of Bill Gates and others didn’t need it.
Seriously. If you are mediocre, the shingle ads a bit of needed shinyness. But one can be even shinyer without it, based on a lot of factors.
In my career, every single one of the “superstars” I’ve met or worked with does NOT have a four year degree. Every. single. one.
That is pretty important....lol.
I have both of my kids, 16 & 19, utilizing the Khan Academy website. I learned of it last year while watching one of Stossel’s education shows about charter schools, etc.
It is GREAT. With over 4,000 videos. I mentioned it to my daughter who was away her freshman year and majoring in Chemical Engineering . . . some of the professors have a very difficult to understand accent combined with a difficult subject, AP Chemisty or whatever her Calculus or Physic level classes were, and even at college level, up through maybe sophomore classes, she found the videos very helpful to watch after certain lectures on chapters or sections and prior to exams for review.
Now, I’m trying to get son, junior in high school, to utilize the videos to up his ACT score. Plus he is taking three AP classes this year.
I plan on sending a small donation . . . of course nothing quite so significant as Bill & Melinda Gates, but the videos are a great resource. I even tell other parents, the kid who carries my groceries out at the store who mentions he is taking Organic Chemistry in high school, just about anybody who I think they might benefit . . .and they quickly add the name/website into their cell phone. :)
Other than exams, I could have done the same thing for my on campus degrees. There were a few classes where the professor did some type of oral examination of a project (nothing like bringing in a circuit board and having the professor point at a wire and ask "why is that there?"), but other than that I could have easily dropped off someone else's work.
And why bother with a spouse doing the work when you can outsource to India? < /s>
They stick a Mountain Dew and copy of Wired under a box, with a trip wire attached. When they come back, the ones that haven't tried to escape the trap are keepers. If you are looking for desktop techs, about half the time you can replace the Dew and Wired with Jack Daniels and porno and get the same results.
There is also a fair amount of academic carping about the competition...
Show me a Marxist, and I'll show you someone who not only can't compete, but believes he's entitled to stamp out the very idea of competition.
Khan Academy is great. Wonderful courses!
Also.....For anyone who is serious about math I recommend the Saxon Math books. Always get the solutions book as well.
Schools better get smart QUICK!!! The days of paying $30K+ a year by parents for 4 year degrees with NO career/job outcome related to the degree(s) in question could be ending???
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