Re:Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?
by whatyoucantsay on Thursday March 15, 2018 @12:06AM
(#16590338)
Doing certificates on edX and Coursera is the wrong path. Their certificates and "micro-masters" or "nano degrees" are worthless.
The way you do it is you go through a full 4-year program on MIT's OCW. You do the same assignments and write the same tests actual students did a decade ago. Then you take a GRE subjects test.
Whether or not you use the score to enter a graduate school, it carries weight. The same is true for those who self study through one or preferably two or three levels of the CFA examinations.
Re:Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?
by znpy on Thursday March 15, 2018 @05:22AM
(#16591366)
> The way you do it is you go through a full 4-year program on MIT's OCW. You do the same assignments and write the same tests actual students did a decade ago. Then you take a GRE subjects test.
Well surely you can do everything in your free time, but MIT is still not going to give you a degree of any kind for doing a full 4-year program on MIT OCW.
Re:Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?
by whatyoucantsay on Thursday March 15, 2018 @05:37PM
(#16596721)
Yes. This is exactly why it's important to do a rigourous exam such as a GRE subject test or a CFA.
Re:Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?
by jacques_chester on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @06:41PM
(#16589001)
> So if you want to get your bachelor's on-line, well you're out of luck.
It depends who you want to get it from. The school where I studied law has offered online undergraduate and postgraduate law degrees for over a decade.
Its promise was to bring education to all those who couln't previously reach it, either geographically, financially or for for time reason (fulltime work and no time to actually attend lessons).
Instead, it brought higher education to those who already had a formal education (see Udacity's OMS-CS) or by offering non-degree, informal "certificates" (edX's micro-masters and Coursera's certificates).
So if you want to get your bachelor's on-line, well you're out of luck. You can still access many courses (which is nice), and end up with a patchwork of knowledge that is certainly better than nothing, but is still a patchwork with all the things that this implies.
So yeah, imho online education did not disrupt a thing. Universities are still doing the same old thing, and very little changed.
"Online education" is a nice thing, but it is also definitely a failure in the end (as did not achieve its original purpose).