Ask HN: Getting a CS "degree" via MIT OpenCourseWare?

I want a proper CS education, but I messed up my high school and theres no way I'm getting into any good schools locally.

I was discussing with my parents and thinking of dedicating a few years to signing up and passing a full CS degree curriculum via MIT OpenCourseWare. I'm currently a mobile consultant and have been in the field for awhile, I'm mainly doing this to get some sort of accreditation in my field beyond just high school and university is out of the picture and to get a more in depth proper understanding of computer science.

I want to be able to take a complex problem and design an elegant solution to it. Right now I'm just a code monkey with no real world application beyond "code this according to spec".

How would potential employers view this?

Has anyone done this before and been hired?

"No registration, no enrollment, and no grades or credits are offered" from http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/

But It is worthing to spend time on online courses now. I have finished some courses on https://www.coursera.org/ and https://www.udemy.com. I can always learn from the best. I finished my Bachelor's degree and Master's degree more than a decade ago. If I were able to access those course at that time, I wouldn't go to schools to waste my time and my parents' and my money. But that's a personal choice.

And I don't think my degrees matter much for job seeking nowadays. You can easily demonstrate your abilities by developing apps or contributing to Open Source projects.

While MIT might offer good courses, they're designed to be tough for a very select group of the best prepared students even with the support resources such as Teaching Assistants and labs and peer students and professors with office hours that are accessible only on campus. Without those, it can only be tougher. In my opinion, tougher to the level that a multi-year project has a low chance of success even for a person of above average motivation and intelligence.

Personally, I think a CS education from an average school will probably better prepare anyone motivated enough to have a chance of completing a full slate of MIT courses as self study. You can always get a graduate degree someplace more selective.

https://www.edx.org/xseries

The difference is important if the concern is about credentials, too; when the concern is about credentials, then exactly what the degree is in can be very important.

CS and IT mean different things, including (perhaps especially) to people who are evaluating credentials. (In some cases, IT may be preferred, in other cases, CS may be.)