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I'm taking the UC Berkeley class in AI through edx.com and I can see why you wouldn't want to offer credit. It would be way to easy to cheat without having some paid testing company giving tests like they do for certification exams. But it is a great resource for surveying a discipline and seeing how its taught in a major university. I don't see any reason why they couldn't make it work for the kind of massive introd…
They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course is low.
The issue is one of accountability, not quality. The quality of many of these courses is very high, but there are not yet good mechanisms in place to certify the learning for a student is actually happening, and that is why they shouldn't be accompanied by credit.
I'm taking the UC Berkeley class in AI through edx.com and I can see why you wouldn't want to offer credit. It would be way to easy to cheat without having some paid testing company giving tests like they do for certification exams. But it is a great resource for surveying a discipline and seeing how its taught in a major university. I don't see any reason why they couldn't make it work for the kind of massive introd…
Copied from my comment on an earlier posting of the same story- From the original article- "However, it's worth noting that more than a quarter of the professors felt that their successful MOOC students do deserve credit. Those respondents include faculty members at Penn, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford. Most of them led courses that were oriented to math, science, and engineering." Which makes sense, those are subject…
Even if you don't get "real" MIT credit, a certificate of completion from some of the courses is worth more than credit people get at some universities.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professors-Behind-the-MOOC/...
72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit ... which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher. They are making a huge unwarranted leap when they go from a professor thinking someone doesn't deserve official credit to saying that the quality of a course is low.…
They spend a bit of time talking about how much work went into creating the courses. Of course it takes a lot of time, but you get the payback when you run it the second time, the third time etc. I'm surprised this was not mentioned.
Also, they mentioned that Robert Sedgewick of Princeton didn't wanted to be beaten to the punch creating a MOOC algorithm course. But he already was. Tim Roughgarden of Stanford gave the first course as far as I know. I took both part 1 and part 2 of his course, and both were excellent (more here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...)
Finally, Clay Shirky wrote a good piece on MOOCs a while a go: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the... One of the points he makes is that producing "live" lectures (as opposed to using MOOCs) at a university is a little like only assigning books that the professor giving the lecture has written. Of course you want the best book on the subject, regardless of who wrote it. The same goes for a lecture on the subject. His article is well worth reading.