Originally Posted by Bostonian
Quote
“Leave your G.P.A., your SATs, your recommendations at home,” said Anant Agarwal, the chief executive of edX. “If you have the will to learn, just bring your Internet connection and yourself, and you can get a year of college credit.”
It would be nice if MIT professor Agarwal could promote the initiative without being misleading. GPAs and SAT scores are (imperfectly) predictive of whether someone can do college level work. If they are so unimportant, Agarwal's institution should move to lottery admissions.

Indeed. If everybody could, everybody would. In reality, many who attempt this will fail, and the education received by many of the rest will be a poor substitute for actual instruction. (One of the articles cited below points out that this is a credit-laundering scheme: it won't be evident on the student's transcript that some courses had tens of thousands of students in them.)

These moves by ASU and edX are not designed to increase student success; they are cost-saving measures that cheapen the valuable outcomes of higher education. In-person teaching may become what college used to be-- the thing the elite get-- while everybody else has to make do with teaching themselves or failing.

Useful critical perspectives:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news...offer-freshman-year-online-through-moocs

http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-problem-are-asu-and-edx-solving.html