Now, it may be possible to trick this sometimes or for some time, but if it would be possible consistently universities would long have become meaningless.
Ideally, companies would like to just know exactly what ability you have. However, testing for that is a long, expensive, complicated and hard task. Testing for ability is a hard problem, one you probably need specialized personal for (with knowledge of what abilities exactly you want to test for and the social science chops to make an actual worthwhile test happen). That’s one of the reasons why universities exist.
But this removedness from what companies actually want is also the reason why it’s not perfectly efficient, i.e. you sometimes have to learn stuff you don’t actually need.
All this does is make the "teaching" pary of the course optional.
It's still that way in most law school classes.
It was in Cairns, which actually narrows it down quite a bit if you want to google it.
http://chronicle.com/article/Providers-of-Free-MOOCs-Now/136...
Well, they did what they can. It's very hard to invent a new institution with a trusted reputation, almost by definition.
Also, the dissemination of knowledge is the part that scales the most. Evaluation is tough and expensive, especially if you are trying even modestly to prevent cheating.
Someone could go to a MOOC to learn the stuff, then get the assessment from UWisconsin.
That is the model I expect to predominate in the long term, actually.
Yes and no. When I hire a Harvard grad, is it because he knows things? Well, it's because I assume he doesn't not know anything, sure. But it's also because I know he must have done very well on his SAT's, and must be a really hard worker and very mature if he was able to get the perfect grades in high school you need to get into Harvard. I also know that his network, by virtue of going to Harvard, is probably better than that of someone who didn't go there.
It's much more complex than you make it out to be.
However, there's only a handful of "Harvards". Whatever exact argument you're trying to make (it's a bad thing? it's not going to happpen?), it doesn't scale down past the Ivy League, or it doesn't scale very far.
Besides, past the initial adaptation period, it's not like these credentials are going to be handed out like candy (those that are will be ignored, just as such credentials are today); serious ones like engineering degrees are still going to be years-long affairs. Are you going to prefer the student who showed enough dedication to do it without an enormous centuries-old structure holding their hands and dragging them along with proscribed structure, or the one that did it on their own? I expect significant chunks of the Ivy League to survive; whether they end up held in the universal esteem they are today I consider to be much more up in the air. They may acquire a much more rarified audience, while the rest of the world begins to look at them as a sort of easy way out....
I think Coursera, OpenCourseware, etc, get things backwards. They assume that the knowledge is the valuable part, and so use the online format to deliver knowledge. But in reality, the vast majority of people go to college to get the certification, not the knowledge. That's the valuable part of college education and that's what U of Wisconsin is offering.