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Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

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Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#31

Post by jacques_chester »

znpy wrote: post #18

It is a huge delusion. Its promise was to bring education to all those who couln't previously reach it, either geographically, financially or for for time reason (fulltime work and no time to actually attend lessons). Instead, it brought higher education to those who already had a formal education (see Udacity's OMS-CS) or by offering non-degree, informal "certificates" (edX's micro-masters and Coursera's certificate…

> So if you want to get your bachelor's on-line, well you're out of luck.

It depends who you want to get it from. The school where I studied law has offered online undergraduate and postgraduate law degrees for over a decade.

http://www.cdu.edu.au/law/external-law-degree

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#32

Post by rs86 »

It is a thing. I don't think any online course can beat a good teacher in a small classroom, but online courses can take you a long way, and are wonderful for the broad variety of courses available. YouTube recordings of university lectures are also very useful - MIT has excellent courses available for watching. Self-learning is not suitable for everyone, but if you have discipline and the ability to understand how things fit together in a subject, it can really work.

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#33

Post by trcollinson »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #7
protonimitate wrote: post #4

Personally I think the issue is that we have come to accept and perpetuate the idea that college education is the main path to a high paying, well respected career. Higher education has essentially become a gateway to salaried jobs. IMHO post-high school education should refactor to become more like a trade school system. 95% of the educational programs offered in university have little or nothing to do with real wor…

From experience, most of the coveted companies locally throw resumes without a four year degree in the trash as the first step of the hiring funnel.

Sure but does this have anything to do with a strict educational requirement or a practical requirement to somehow reduce the candidate pool? I have put out public job requests and had literally thousands of applicants. I have at times picked a lot of arbitrary methods for reducing the candidate pool to something useful.

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#35

Post by ffwacom »

ksk wrote: post #29
whatyoucantsay wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it really depends what you're learning. If you took a bunch of mechanical engineering self-taught courses, it is unlikely anyone is going to let you design a bridge. And yet Elon Musk, who studied aerospace on his own, is building rockets. John Carmack, who holds no degree at all, has done the same on a smaller scale. Who let them?

AFAICT, neither of them have designed anything. Elon Musk has an executive role. Carmack's role is unclear. Happy to go through any information you've come across..

Carmack invented modern VR

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#36

Post by mixmastamyk »

trcollinson wrote: post #33
mixmastamyk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From experience, most of the coveted companies locally throw resumes without a four year degree in the trash as the first step of the hiring funnel.

Sure but does this have anything to do with a strict educational requirement or a practical requirement to somehow reduce the candidate pool? I have put out public job requests and had literally thousands of applicants. I have at times picked a lot of arbitrary methods for reducing the candidate pool to something useful.

They’d probably prefer to think the first, but the second is more likely given all the folks under employed these days.

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#37

Post by dsacco »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #7
protonimitate wrote: post #4

Personally I think the issue is that we have come to accept and perpetuate the idea that college education is the main path to a high paying, well respected career. Higher education has essentially become a gateway to salaried jobs. IMHO post-high school education should refactor to become more like a trade school system. 95% of the educational programs offered in university have little or nothing to do with real wor…

From experience, most of the coveted companies locally throw resumes without a four year degree in the trash as the first step of the hiring funnel.

Which companies are the coveted ones? Off the top of my head, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon happily hire people without degrees. Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs also do it. The lucrative private companies I can honestly think of that really won’t consider it are usually small and discreet, not well known and widely pursued.

You still need to pass the interview hazing, and structurally you won’t be “inducted” the same way new graduates are. But if you have prior experience most of these companies will take a look. Even recruiters contact people without degrees. In particular, back when Laszlo Bock was in charge of recruiting at Google he’d routinely say they hired non-graduates because none of their interviewing metrics appeared to have a strong correlation with employee success.

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#38

Post by Someone1234 »

ffwacom wrote: post #35
ksk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, neither of them have designed anything. Elon Musk has an executive role. Carmack's role is unclear. Happy to go through any information you've come across..

Carmack invented modern VR

"Modern VR" has a lineage dating all the way back to the 1950s and has seen progressive advancement (in step with technology) since. No single person invented modern VR, and certainly not someone who wasn't even involved until five-seven years ago that's absurd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History

This will no doubt boil down to some warped definition of what the term "modern" means.

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#39

Post by whatyoucantsay »

znpy wrote: post #18

It is a huge delusion. Its promise was to bring education to all those who couln't previously reach it, either geographically, financially or for for time reason (fulltime work and no time to actually attend lessons). Instead, it brought higher education to those who already had a formal education (see Udacity's OMS-CS) or by offering non-degree, informal "certificates" (edX's micro-masters and Coursera's certificate…

Doing certificates on edX and Coursera is the wrong path. Their certificates and "micro-masters" or "nano degrees" are worthless.

The way you do it is you go through a full 4-year program on MIT's OCW. You do the same assignments and write the same tests actual students did a decade ago. Then you take a GRE subjects test.

Whether or not you use the score to enter a graduate school, it carries weight. The same is true for those who self study through one or preferably two or three levels of the CFA examinations.

Re: Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

#40

Post by ffwacom »

Someone1234 wrote: post #38
ffwacom wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack invented modern VR

"Modern VR" has a lineage dating all the way back to the 1950s and has seen progressive advancement (in step with technology) since. No single person invented modern VR, and certainly not someone who wasn't even involved until five-seven years ago that's absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History This will no doubt boil down to some warped definition of what the term "modern" means.

Modern VR as in sticking a phone screen 50mm from your eyeballs. Carmack did a lot of the work tackling the latency and tracking issues.
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