Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education MITx

http://chronicle.com/article/MIT-Mints-a-Valuable-New-Form/130410/
January 22, 2012
MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
By Kevin Carey
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things�radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations�more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together�free content and sophisticated online pedagogy��and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi�al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much.

In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something�you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it.

The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputation to put its brand and credibility behind open-education resources and credentials to match. But most world-famous universities got that way through a process of exclusion. Their degrees are coveted and valuable precisely because they're expensive and hard to acquire. If an Ivy League university starts giving degrees away for free, why would everyone clamor to be admitted to an Ivy League university?

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I wonder if in the future, some bright youngsters will get certifications from MITx (or similar places), get good, intellectually challenging jobs based on these credentials, and not need to spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a B.A.

I wonder if we'll have professional course (or test) takers who obtain certification using other people's names. I'm not familiar with the project, but perhaps someone here can tell me, or point me to the explanation in regards to how MIT will confirm the identity of those they credential.

Just thinking about this from the perspective of law schools, the only reason that I went to Duke for law school was because of it's rank as a T14.

I basically paid for a title of nobility, for lack of a better phrase. Granted, it's a lesser title (and I'm still kind of ashamed since it isn't Harvard or Yale), but I knew I was buying a title and wasn't really trying to get an education.

There is a lot of guild structure built into the career tracks that lead to high income jobs, such as BigLaw (I personally actually avoided NYC and DC as places to work because I figured they would kill me - I've chosen sanity over income).

This will be useful for certain types of employment, but not some of the larger pipelines. My guess is that the larger impact will be felt at the community college and state school levels. Ultimately, employers will have to decide what it means.

People get into top law schools largely based on college GPA and LSAT scores. If the legal training at top law schools is not better than at other schools, why don't top law firms recruit at less prestigious law schools, filtering for students with high GPAs and LSAT scores?

Law firms hire on the basis of prestige, primarily. T3, then T6, then T14.

The rule for law schools is that the harder the school is to get into, the less you have to work in that school, the less you will get in terms of actual legal skill, and the better job you will get when you get out.

Legal training is more of a factor at less prestigious schools. In fact, you probably get people with more legal knowledge and training at schools below the T14.

My experience is in business programs, not law schools, but I have an undergraduate BBA from a tippy-top program, and an MBA from a program ranked in the top 25. The difference was HUGE between the two experiences, and it was all about the students and class discussions. Profs were stellar at both, but the lively and intelligent discussion at the tippy top school made it a MUCH more valuable experience than my time at the top 25 school. I assume the same applies to law achools.

I think that there may be some degree of inherent bias in the reporting of the experiences of people in the top schools and those in slightly lower-ranked ones. It may be that people who manage to get into the T3 or T6 or T14 schools are sufficiently bright that they don't experience the work as being all that difficult or rigorous, in contrast to students who are not quite as highly capable and are attending schools ranked just below them, who are having to work harder to produce work of comparable quality.

If your assertion about the nature and rigor of the education is spot-on, employers may have found that those bright law graduates from the top schools are perfectly capable of acquiring whatever technical legal knowledge is required for a particular case as the need arises, and may be hiring primarily on the basis of intelligence and the ability to look at situations from many different perspectives, one of the most critical talents in a lawyer.

It's an interesting question to consider.

The most critical talents for a lawyer, in the world of BigLaw (which is the prime $$$ area - where you can get into the 1%), is to build a $2,000,000 book of business so that you become a partner and don't get tossed out to the curb after 10 years. The clock starts ticking when you start working. You can have excellent technical skill, like one of my friends, and be stuck at age 40 because you simply can't attract business.

So, it's really salesmanship and marketing that's the issue, not technical skill. There is an oversupply of technical skill and an undersupply of work upon which to apply this skill. So, for areas such as law, an MITx program would simply depress salaries. Generally those of law professors, which would be a good thing if it could reduce student debt.

I would expect the MITx program to be excellent for something like bioinformatics, where I suspect there is an undersupply of skill rather than an oversupply.

I am definitely interested in this especially since my son will be wearing a brace for the next few years and it is difficult for him to take classes anywhere but online. I am hoping we will be able to get better internet speed soon because we can only watch videos sometimes--one of the many disadvantages of living in our small town.

My son is interested in so many things and free online classes are a good way for him to try things he is interested in without being stuck on one learning track.

My son is very interested in politics at the moment and is busy building his knowledge base of history, economics, political science, law and the constitution, and debate.

Here is an article on another online higher education venture. I am wary of the idea of students grading each others papers. It should be obvious that a history professor is better qualified to grade a history term paper than a student taking an introductory course.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/t...versity-partners-for-online-classes.html
Online Education Venture Lures Cash Infusion and Deals With 5 Top Universities
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
April 18, 2012

...

Unlike previous video lectures, which offered a “static” learning model, the Coursera system breaks lectures into segments as short as 10 minutes and offers quick online quizzes as part of each segment.

Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Dr. Koller said that this would actually improve the learning experience.

The Coursera system also offers an online feature that allows students to get support from a global student community. Dr. Ng said an early test of the system found that questions were typically answered within 22 minutes.