72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don't Think Students Deserve Credit

Article has huge spin on it, claiming "This is not a good sign for online education".

Phrasing of question is do they "deserve formal credit from your home institution." No of course not, the class is free and they are not enrolled in the school. If the free class gets full credit, the university falls apart.

Also, giving real credit means you have to have money coming in, proctoring on site in their country for the tests, and id card checks. This will massively increase costs and completely eliminate the ability of people in most parts of the world from being able to take the class. One of the reasons for these classes is to open up western college style education to people throughout the world. Switching it to a pay model that validates identity just converts the whole thing into online extension courses, which they have already, and those certainly have never been MOOCs, enrollment numbers have been modest not in the 20,000-200,000 enrollment range per session (yes, with 10% passing but that means little, they still have huge numbers passing).

well online courses by deemed universities is still in its infancy, so yeah it will take time before people will only take lessons from home.

This. People confuse education with accreditation. Online courses (should) provide education very cheaply. I hope the US accreditation system gets fixed so that it is cheap too or not so important for employment.

Having studied at a university, I think Online Courses are not (yet) a replacement for university courses. They still need work. On Coursera for instance I noticed a lack of advanced and even intermediate courses. It seems almost all courses there are introductory. A paranoid person might say this goes well with professors being afraid of online courses. I say this is just not very elaborated yet.

Anyway it's ridiculous to claim that you shouldn't get credit from online courses. Top universities all over the world give you credit for stuff you do at home, in particular when it comes to advanced courses.

I'm not saying you should be able to do your whole Master or whatever from home -- it's definitely necessary to have tests where you physically attend -- but this survey result seems stupid. Maybe the question is just stupid. They asked about the status quo, not about online education in general.

At some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, "what is a 'credit' and what is it really good for, anyway?"

At least in their current incarnation, MOOCs are not intended for credentialing, they are intended for learning and enrichment. I like it that way. I can learn as much about a topic as I want to, skip the parts I'm not interested in, and I don't need to care or worry about what's going to be "on the test" or whether I got a fair grade. And I don't have to go sign up and pay for a community college course and go to class at night to learn about how databases work or something--I can do it for free from the comfort of my own home.