Online Courses and the $100 Graduate Degree 339
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the no-need-for-a-loan dept.
from the no-need-for-a-loan dept.
First time accepted submitter GCA10 writes "Forbes reports on the latest project of Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun (the proponent of self-driving cars.) He's moved on to education now, believing that conventional university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ineffective to survive for long. So he started Udacity, which aims to deliver an online version of a master's degree for $100 per student. From the article: 'Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”'"
Hopefully this succeeds (Score:3, Insightful)
I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer. There is no reason it should cost a fortune to become educated. It's a legal racket, much like for-profit healthcare and pharmaceuticals.
What stops me from going back to college now in my mid-forties is ROI. I cannot afford to be in massive debt what with a wife and kid. My wife has massive school debt from her degree and it would be grossly unfair to add to that already burdensome bill.
Great idea... praying it succeeds.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
You get what you pay for
And yet some of the best things in life are free. It would be nice to add a world class education to that list.
Re:I took his AI class (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the issue is whether people can be taught for low amounts money. Clearly they can. Just have a HUGE number listening online, and you can make a living easilly by spreading the cost among them. Per student, it will be very low.
The real problem is the cost of evaluating what students know. You can't give someone a master's degree unless you can evaluate that they know their stuff, or else the degree becomes worthless. And evaluations require tests. True, you *could* make all the tests multiple choice, but what about times when a hands on test in a lab environment is needed? What about times when creativity is required in the answer, or designs have to be drawn, etc, and it can't be fit into a multiple choice test? A computer can't grade that. Humans have to. Hiring TAs for 160,000 people is going to raise the cost far above $100. Unless he plans to just do multiple choice, in which case, his students will likely be good at memorization and not hands on application. And cheating may also be easier with 160,000 people taking anonymous multiple choice tests.
And I would also argue a lot of good educations require hands on lab training too, which is something else that becomes costly when you think of test lab infrastructures for so many people.
...however, (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, there are many important things that simply can't be taught via computer. I am an evolutionary biologist (specifically human evolution), so that is what I know: you can't learn anatomy at the graduate level without cadavers, period. You can't learn biological variation without dissecting and studying many cadavers. You can't learn comparative anatomy without dissecting animals. You can't learn the fossil record without handling the fossils (or high quality casts). You can't learn population genetics without spending time in a sequencing lab. You can't learn field biology without going to the field. You can't learn paleontology without going to the field. There are many things that I learned in my graduate training that simply can't be taught on a computer.
Personal tutelage by a master is similarly an irreplaceable experience. I've learned an enormous amount of information from watching online lectures and taking online courses in subjects outside of my specialties - but I would absolutely not consider myself on par with people who have traditional graduate training in these fields. I loved the AI class - but Professor Thrun never discussed my ideas with me, criticized my writings on the topic, and certainly never helped me design a project and then execute it. I can't call, Skype, or email authorities in AI to chat about the newest papers in the field - because I simply never met them through the online course.
As enthusiastic as I am about the exciting possibilities of newfangled gadgetry, computers and the internet are still tools with limitations. Powerful tools, but not totipotent tools. Sometimes newer isn't better. Sometimes newer is worse.
Of course it is possible... (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Get a worthless piece of paper to distinguish yourself. Sure, it isn't good, it isn't a positive trend, but in many fields unless you have a bachelor's or master's degree your application won't even be looked at.
B) Provides opportunities for networking with like minded students and employers. In high school most people couldn't meet with very many like minded students, especially if they were into computer science. There is a reason many start-ups happen in college, you can get all the "right" type of people, you get the people with vision, you get the code monkeys skilled with every programming language under the sun, you get the hardware people and you have thousands of potential customers right at your university.
C) It provides a chance to go out and see the world. Being a student you usually don't have much of anything tying you down to a single country. I mean, sure, you've got family, but spending a year in France, six months in Singapore, a few weeks in Andorra isn't anything major.
D) It provides a lot of "hobby time" to work on pet projects and research, especially at graduate level. When you are employed for a company, everything needs to be justified in terms of profit. In college you can just do things for the heck of it.
Every "book knowledge" thing you can learn in college can be learned for free online. In the rare case it can't be found online, it can be found in the textbook which you can buy without registering for the class. Yes, you do have a handful of really good professors, but the best thing they provide isn't book knowledge, it is guidance.
when higher edu wants Physical Education (Score:2, Insightful)
when higher edu wants Physical Education as a required class it shows that it is a cash grab and some ways a rip off.
Re:That's UnAmerican! (Score:5, Insightful)
A) College is about knowledge. This used to be the case when a good chunk of information could only be found in academic libraries, but today a simple Google search can find you the information for all but the most specialized of areas.
B) College is about qualifications. This is the main viewpoint today since we've dumbed high school down to the point where everyone can pass, people need another qualification for most professions that qualification is college.
C) College is about the experience. This is true and the viewpoint I tend to take, but at the same time, there are a lot of cheaper ways to get even better experiences than college, especially if you know what you want to do.
Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at it this way; in the future an employer needs to select a new hire. 2 people apply, both with master's degress. One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?
Indeed, you get what you paid for, not.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:2, Insightful)
Too Late! (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't give someone a master's degree unless you can evaluate that they know their stuff, or else the degree becomes worthless.
Between grade inflation and cheating it seems like that is awfully close to true for the vast majority of degrees today.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
An awful lot of Americans are paying a lot and getting very little out of college right now... especially at for-profit universities [salon.com]. Every taxpayer has an interest in this subject because of federal student loans.
Major reform is going to be necessary because the college debt bubble is going to pop sooner rather than later. I applaud this man's effort to bring some fiscal sanity to the world of higher education.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Insightful)
One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?
That's a good question.
One hundred dollars buys two or three hours of time from a professional tutor or teaching assistant.
Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose that's true, until people who have completed the less expensive one prove more capable and useful, in significant numbers, over time.
Then you take the better one. Who actually cares what you paid for your degree? The point of having one (nowadays) is to determine how useful you'll be before you have a real work history.
Please make free online (Score:4, Insightful)
text books. Html 5 interactive text books. Start with K-5, then move on up.
Please.
Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities (Score:5, Insightful)
As a scientific programmer, I find it amazing that any significant portion of people in serious IT place no value on math higher than and including trigonometry. Is this actually the case?
And as a citizen in a democracy, I find it amazing and frightening that a significant portion of people who actually vote see no value in general education courses. When I was a kid in the 90's, we used to call someone a "tool" as an insult.
Time is money (Score:2, Insightful)
You get what you pay for
Time is money.
The time you put into your studies is also a payment. Its merely a payment that does not go into the school's bank account.
Some rare individuals are perfectly capable of a university level education through their own independent studies. That said, most people who believe they are capable of doing so are incorrect. One of many reasons is that they will cherry pick topics to study and pass on some topic that they have no interest in, this is often a mistake. Most people need the structure of a formal degree program, or something comparable, to get the broader understanding that they actually should have.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you say, it's a meritocracy where ass licking skills are what matters instead of academics. Yeah, I've been to a U.S. school too, and while the quality of education was way better than what I had in Europe, the social side of it was a disaster. I tried to stay on campus only for the classes and library time.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very sad that those connections matter. School should be about what you know and what you can do, not about your ass licking skills :(
Re:Perhaps you missed the point. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem I find with this crazy old fashion idea is that there's no way tell if it actually amounts to much, if anything. All I always hear is from people who believe in the idea pronouncing that the world will end because people are not up to snuff on their [insert subject name here]. All I can see in real life is people who get suckered because they fail at fairly basic applied natural sciences, math, psychology, sociology, finance, etc. None of the arts and other humanities seem to matter at all. Even history is exaggerated, because on its own it's just a big body of experimental results, so to speak, with no theories as to how one would apply them to anything. Similar to a lot of psychology and sociology, of course. People point to stuff happening in the past and say: see, had people known this, they'd have averted problem X. And it keeps getting repeated and taken in on faith, with not a single decent study to show that it's actually so. Sad.
Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities (Score:4, Insightful)
US vs Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
I paid a total of 10000$ to get a BSc, an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science in Italy. I now work happily as a researcher in the Netherlands.
Higher education should not be treated as an enterprise. Higher knowledge is a very scarce commodity (an online recording system/whatever is not the same thing, otherwise the easily available books would be more than sufficient to get any degree); this means that schools are effectively a monopoly without much competition.
Who can solve this? The state. Look all over Europe for the simple solution: higher education benefits everyone and is paid (because paid it must be) by the state mostly and the end user a little bit. The little bit in some cases is increased if the student is not passing enough exams. There are also *lots* of scholarships that both look at ability and low income, and these often end up supporting poorer students who do not necessarily have excellent results but just ok results.
Why does the state need to step in? Because Communism is great and Mother Russia is close-by? No: the state needs to step in because the gain with more educated citizens is of the collective, not just the subject of the education.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet some of the best things in life are free.
Not quite.
At the risk of sounding incredibly troll-ish, the best things in life are illegal.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:3, Insightful)
$100 is probably not enough to pay the people who will mark the exams. Most universities allow external students: those who are not taught by the university but simply show up and take the exams, and you'd be hard pressed to find any that do so for $100. A masters course typically involves a dissertation that is at least 100 pages. Just reading it is going to take several hours. If you can do it in five hours (which is pretty good going for a thorough read of a masters dissertation) then you're talking $20/hour, and not leaving any more time for marking the other exams.
I would not trust a $100 masters degree (unless that's just $100 paid by the student, with the rest funded from elsewhere) for the simple reason that it is not feasible to do a proper assessment of the student for that little money. $1000 might be quite feasible though...
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Insightful)
It usually is, unfortunately -- in the U.S., that is. It's a big social club, like a mutual adoration society, closed to outsiders. That's not very healthy for the long term progress, you know.