Taking a cue from the popularity of massive multi-player online games, the American Council on Education will decide whether to give its stamp of approval to massive open online courses (MOOCs), a form of teaching that is gaining momentum among students and higher educational institutions.
Approval of MOOCs could bode particularly well for IT professionals seeking experts in big-data, virtualization, security, cloud, and other high-demand technologies, where graduation rates typically are below job openings. These free online courses, typically taught by top professors, are open to all via the Internet. More universities and colleges are offering courses in an array of topics from philosophy to chemistry and everything in between.
As Molly Corbett Broad, president of the council, told USA Today:
MOOCs are an intriguing, innovative new approach that holds much promise for engaging students across the country and around the world, as well as for helping colleges and universities broaden their reach. But as with any new approach, there are many questions about long-term potential, and ACE is eager to help answer them.
Next year, the council will work with faculty teams to examine content and the rigor of courses to determine whether they should receive college credit. This is a spin-off from Ace Credit, a division of the council that was created in 1974, to help adults earn credits for courses and exams they took outside traditional degree programs, according to USA Today.
Each educational institution would decide whether or not to follow the council's recommendation. Professor Dan Boneh of Stanford University, for example, offers cryptography via Coursera, a "social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free." Boneh's six-week course, which began November 5, includes written homework and programming labs, and included a discussion of deployed protocols, mistakes in existing systems, public key techniques, and encryption, according to his course description.
An as-yet unscheduled course by Barbara Endicott-Popovsky will tackle Information Security and Risk Management In Context, while Professor Hank Lucas is scheduled to address Surviving Disruptive Technologies during an April 2013 course. Coursera offers IT-related programs in artificial intelligence, robotics, and vision; programming and software engineering; systems, security, and networking; computer science theory; electrical and materials engineering; information, technology, and design; law; mathematics and statistics; data analysis; and scientific computing.
Competitor UDacity features many courses of interest to technology professionals, offering a handful of beginner courses, with an emphasis on intermediate and advanced programs in topics including Web development, software testing, programming languages, HTML5 game development, software debugging, building a startup, artificial intelligence, parallel programming, and applied cryptography. (You can also brush up on your humanities, too, if you'd like, perhaps taking a course in American poetry.)
For its part, edX -- formed by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley -- offers classes including SaaS using Ruby on Rails, SaaS + Agile, foundations of computer graphics, introduction to computer science and programming, AI, and quantitative methods in clinical and public health research.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is funding the council's initiative, is also researching the impact of MOOCs to determine their impact on student learning, college attainment levels, and engaging adult learners.
Ideally, the council will allow educators to award credits to those students who attend and pass MOOCs. But even if that doesn't occur, IT professionals would be wise to review the courses available to them at these sites, especially those classes taught by professors from such highly regarded universities.
At a time when IT departments are expected to understand their organizations' business issues and CIOs increasingly vie for the same technological talent, it makes sense to promote the use of these highly esteemed, free educational tools within your departments anywhere in the world to educate staff and further increase the value of your teams.
I think there will always be room for traditional brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. Coincidentally, we were discussing university with our daughter the other day (she's in 7th grade), and I strongly suggested to her that she attend a traditional school vs. an online college, primarily because of the social and interactive experiences. Plus she's a great softball player and expects to continue playing that sport beyond high school, which would be tough to do via the Internet!
However, I believe that online education is a fantastic resource for students with children; employees looking to grow into new careers or improve their promotion chances; people who want to explore other options; people with health issues; individuals with financial concerns, etc. And there are plenty of "traditional" students who, for one reason or another, would rather attend university/college online. Offering everyone the opportunity to further their education by multiple means cannot be a bad thing at all!
I am all for education promotion using all available means.
But if it was in my power, instead of such courses offered for higher-end higher-ed type courses (often utilized by people who possibly could afford online, multi-media or printed books on such topics), I would have major sponsors fund similar efforts to enable basic education to the billions who neither have PCs, nor Internet connections, nor, often, even electricity.
A global network of WLAN enabled kiosks or banks of kiosks enabling every child on every continent to be able to get a basic education, at zero cost. That would take away one excuse poor parents have to not send kids to schools in those parts of the world.
You may say I'm a dreamer.....but I'm not the only one... I hope.
We can hope that the tradition-bound and staid academics who zealously and jealously guard their bailiwicks with vicious rapacity (as the joke runs, because the stakes are so incredibly low) will see the light, but historically speaking, they would rather die than allow something that will actually aid distance learning and non-traditional educational methods. Simply put, the more time they have in academia, and the higher their degrees, the less flexible they are likely to be. It is therefore intuitively obvious (to even the most casual observer) that this will require more than just the inprimitur of a well-known nerd to make any headway against the tide of time. And that's just the way they like it.
If the top universities are promoting it and with financial backing from Bill Gates, online education will be officially mainstream with many other schools to follow.
Perhaps the main critical issue will be protecting the brick and mortar environment (the traditional classroom setting).
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