21–30 of 135 posts
Does this really demonstrate Coursera "giving up on the dream [of eliminating barriers to education]?" IMO, the important thing about MOOCs has never been accreditation (show me an employer who actually cares about potential candidates' MOOC certifications, anyway), but simply making university-level courses available without the overhead of actually attending school. And in that regard, nothing's changed.
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I honestly don't understand this. The article talks about revolutionizing the world of education and yet expects the online courses to give out certifications, like classical schools do. The free online courses exist so that you have free access to education, not that you have a piece of something that you can show to people. That might be an added benefit, and I see nothing wrong with strict requirements and chargin…
There are expectations of certification in many industries, and the assumption is often made that without a certificate, you do not have the knowledge. In the IT world, this isn't really a thing, but outside it, it often is.
It's therefore completely reasonable to expect a 'replacement for classical schooling' to also provide similar certifications. Because that's what you need from a social point of view.
While what the OP mentioned is True , what i really think is that the real value of MOOCs is not in the certificate (it not that much important especially from MOOC providers) but the opportunity that it creates for people to gain knowledge , and personally speaking , MOOCs have changed my life , i live in 3rd world country where the quality of education is worse than you can imagine, but thanks to Coursera, Edx and…
Instead I referred them to the British Library thesis lookup service[0] and pointed out that there's no way I could fake that. It was accepted (much to my relief!) but others may not have that option.
So sometimes some sort of documentary evidence of a qualification is going to be necessary.
While what the OP mentioned is True , what i really think is that the real value of MOOCs is not in the certificate (it not that much important especially from MOOC providers) but the opportunity that it creates for people to gain knowledge , and personally speaking , MOOCs have changed my life , i live in 3rd world country where the quality of education is worse than you can imagine, but thanks to Coursera, Edx and…
While what the OP mentioned is True , what i really think is that the real value of MOOCs is not in the certificate (it not that much important especially from MOOC providers) but the opportunity that it creates for people to gain knowledge , and personally speaking , MOOCs have changed my life , i live in 3rd world country where the quality of education is worse than you can imagine, but thanks to Coursera, Edx and…
Once someone learns something -- they can put it into practice (or not if they were just learning for fun).
It makes sense that in the future, rather than a certificate, examples of putting learning into practice would become more important. It is certainly easy to show proof of practice already with smartphones, cheaper computers and great publishing tools.
portfolio trumps certificate :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearly all personnel managers don't have the knowledge to examine whether the candidate has a solid knowledge in an area or not. So in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to rather trust in institutions (in particular universities) that have.
Yes, as long as the institution is reputable this is a pretty good heuristic. Of course, determining how reputable an institution is can be a problem in its own right if there are tons of institutions offering seemingly identical certification.
First: Compare the time you need to check an institution vs. the time you need for assessing a job candidate (in particular the former only has to be done one time, the latter for each candidate).
Second: Nearly all universities in Germany (in terms of quality of education) can be considered as rather equal. On the other hand: If you have a graduation certificate from a university in a country, where this is not the case, you will, indeed, be doubted, if it's not from a internally renowned university. Similar things hold for the German academic scholarship programs (there are only seven or so big ones in Germany and you know which focus they have on the candidates).
> Yes, as long as the institution is reputable this is a pretty good heuristic.
Third: This is why you preferably get certificates from reputable institutions (for Coursera, the fact that Stanford offered courses there gave some initial credibility; the same holds for edX - MIT).
Fourth: The fact that I got certificates on Coursera from not-so-renowned universities, too, doesn't make them worthless. They'd only be doubted to show deep knowledge in the topic of the course. They still show that I'm willing to upgrade my education on my one (something that employers, of course, love to see).
I honestly don't understand this. The article talks about revolutionizing the world of education and yet expects the online courses to give out certifications, like classical schools do. The free online courses exist so that you have free access to education, not that you have a piece of something that you can show to people. That might be an added benefit, and I see nothing wrong with strict requirements and chargin…
> That might be an added benefit, and I see nothing wrong with strict requirements and charging money for it, but the primary purpose is the education, not the certificate. This seems to be a very US-centric mentality. In Germany's mentality it's rather different: Universities are (mostly) free, but about anybody will want to see a certificate for about anything that you claim to have accomplished. So if you can't sh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearly all personnel managers don't have the knowledge to examine whether the candidate has a solid knowledge in an area or not. So in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to rather trust in institutions (in particular universities) that have.
Yes, as long as the institution is reputable this is a pretty good heuristic. Of course, determining how reputable an institution is can be a problem in its own right if there are tons of institutions offering seemingly identical certification.
The only solution is to evaluate a candidate directly. Where or how they learned what they know is at best a mechanism to filter resumes but that itself is a bit naive since you could get candidates from famous universities that don't know anything useful.