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Re:MIT and Harvard announce edX by radicalbyte on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @10:48AM (#3919309)
The quality of the Coursera material is much higher than the quality of The Open University.

I've earnt 150/330 points at L1/L2 towards a Bachelor's around Software Engineering with the Open University UK. I pretty much just took took exams and wrote the required essays in order to pass.

NOTE: the level 3 courses have programming projects connected to them.

Right now I'm following Compilers and Finite Automata with Coursera. I've learnt more in a week than I've learnt so far with The Open University.

With Coursera, I actually have to work to pass the class.

So yeah, I hope that Coursera have a plan to turn credits into real degrees. They can charge real money for it.

The one thing I see standing in the way of Coursera et al is identity verification: the OU require you to physically sit exams and provide proof of IT. I can't see how Coursera can get past that.

Re:MIT and Harvard announce edX by peteretep on Thursday May 03, 2012 @01:47AM (#3922534)
If you get bored of The Open University courses, I've been enjoying to Oxford Software Engineering MSc (which doesn't require an undergrad degree)... For the Compiler course on Coursera (which I'm also doing), I found http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/subjects/SEM.html (which you can do just by itself if you like) invaluable
Re:MIT and Harvard announce edX by optymizer on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @10:51AM (#3919319)
you've earned 0/1 points towards spelling Bachelor's correctly :P
Re:MIT and Harvard announce edX by radicalbyte on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @11:27AM (#3919532)
It looks like I was correcting it whilst you were replying.

Since I moved to the Netherlands and learning Dutch (fluently), the quality of my English spelling / grammar has plummeted :(

Re:MIT and Harvard announce edX by optymizer on Friday May 04, 2012 @10:34AM (#3928527)
concurrency issue, huh? :) As a non-native English speaker, I know how you feel.