MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated 205
jyosim (904245) writes People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match. The report imagines a world in which students can take online courses they assemble themselves from parts they find online: "Much like a playlist on iTunes, a student could pick and choose the elements of a calculus or a biology course offered across the edX platform to meet his or her needs."
Re:Idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of a structured educational degree is to give you a damn well rounded knowledge set of the topic, giving you a reasoned idea why the individual components of the topical area are important as a whole.
Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...
Sometimes a students individual educational "needs" (rather, the term in the summary is wrong, it should be "wants" - the student "wants" to study the fun stuff, and "wants" to avoid the drudgery) is not the same as the "needs" of society as a whole as society would benefit more from graduates with a well rounded knowledge base rather than an enhanced specialism straight out of university.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
As the other poster says, well rounded is not jack of all trades, its just well rounded in what you do - so a web developer knows about HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, the Dom, interacting with the server side, and the various aspects of the server side part of the equation, so how to handle requests, state, database accesses, design patterns, data structures etc etc.
What I fear MIT will do is producing someone who graduates from their Web Developer course being absolutely excellent in HTMl, JS etc but knows sod all about caching, state management, design patterns, UX etc.
This is a thing already (Score:4, Interesting)
You pick courses that you want to take, take X amount of hours and are awarded a degree. In theory, students specialize in areas the school doesn't offer degrees in, to thereby personalize their education that much further.
In reality it is a junk degree awarded to D students and sports players who don't want to take anything above a 300 level course.
Re:Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
"The jack of all trades in the IT world is much less more valuable than it was 20 years ago"
The push for 'DevOps' seems to contradict you.
Interdisciplinary and Badges (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it may not be as bad as you guys think, depending how this is implemented.
Definitely, especially at the bachelors level, it needs to be a "guided tour" to help students learn about subjects they didn't even know they existed. They need exposure to certain important topics to serve as a base, allowing the student to go forward.
I think where this module idea can help is that, under the current system, you get a very direct track through basic major courses, then a bunch of liberal arts requirements to satisfy (arts, philosophy, etc.). There is not, in my experience, a whole lot of in-major electives. Everyone takes the same track. Degree programs are largely the same across the country.
I firmly believe our future Einsteins will come from the ranks of those trained in interdisciplinary thought -- the people that DON'T just take the same track, but go a little off script too. If a student understands the basic concepts of a field, but doesn't like it, why waste the student's time with more of that just to fit in 3 semester hours of a class to meet a checklist, when the student can switch half way through a semester to another field and see if that is a better fit? As long as the student understands the basics, I see no problem of letting the student explore a little more rather than trapping them in the class for another 6 weeks.
I think this would be the idea of a badges system -- rather than a degree and classes, you get badges when you show levels of mastery in topics (a novice badge, an intermediate badge, master badge, etc.). A bachelors could be awarded when X number of badges are obtained.