Implications of Full Open Courses from MIT

This will be an interesting experiment.  MIT has for years offered some of their course materials online under the OpenCourseWare project.  Now they are putting whole courses online.

If you are a self motivated learner then you can learn a lot of cool stuff for free!

So… here’s the problem.

The kind of people who will benefit from this type of content will be 1. Self motivated 2. Intelligent 3. Critical Thinkers (because they have to self evaluate).  It sounds like the type of person most companies would love to hire!  But, there’s no degree from MIT.  Because there is no degree, this person won’t even make it past the first cut of job screening.

If this open course content takes off then businesses will begin to look for ways to credential that type of learning.  This means the breaking of the higher education credentialing monopoly.  That means people can learn and get jobs without degrees, and thus the whole higher ed house of cards falls.

Does this seem like a plausibe scenario?

See more on this from a blog post I did last year.

• MIT OpenCourseWare Introduces Complete Courses | Open Culture

  Full courses now offered

  tags: education MIT open nell

  • This week, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project launched OCW Scholar, a new series of courses “designed for independent learners who have few additional resources available to them.” To date, MIT has given students access to isolated materials from MIT courses. Now, with this new initiative, lifelong learners can work with a more rounded set of resources. OWC Scholar takes video lectures, homework problems, problem solving videos, simulations, readings, etc., and stitches them into a structured curriculum. Perfect for the self-disciplined student.

     

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