Another comment has noted that the fact that this program is nationally, as opposed to regionally accredited "could affect whether or not credits acquired here are recognized by other schools."
I would revise this to say "This will mean that your credits will almost certainly not transfer to any regionally accredited school." Pretty much every college worth going to is regionally accredited. To make this clear, regional accreditation is harder to achieve than national accreditation, yet my local community college and University of Phoenix are both regionally accredited.
On the other hand, you have schools like ITT Tech, which is nationally accredited. This is a school which is notorious for hiding the fact that your credits will likely not transfer to any regionally accredited school.
These are incredibly important things to be aware of before enrolling in any sort of non-traditional school. If you have any desire to use what you've accomplished to move on to, say, a public university, make sure that the classes you're attending will transfer. If the classes you're taking are from a nationally accredited institution, they likely won't.
Under the Human Capital approach, learning via books or free/cheap online courses has the same effect as learning at the most expensive school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
These 2 show wildly different results when you consider the difference between forgetting a subject and failing the subject. You may know just as much as another person, but the one of you that passes some hurdle signals to prospective employers that the hurdle passer is the better candidate. This is because hiring a person is trying to predict future behavior/success with limited information, and many people use signals as heuristics.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons....
One dissertation that described some of these differences is called "Hiring and inequality in elite professional service firms". An interesting read, and it explains some of the "unfairness" of employers using signalling instead of the human capital model.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Hiring_and_inequality_in...
When I hire someone, I typically only get access to their resume. If I wanted to try to reduce my own signal-based-bias and apply the Human Capital theory, should I instead ask for their transcript, and perhaps have someone else remove the name of the institution before I see the transcript?
My suspicion is that you may want to move away from trivia based questions (what is the 3rd parameter of the form.print dialog, or how would you move Mt Fuji) to ones like "describe a situation where you inspired others to meet a common goal" or "Describe a situation when the quality of work you completed wasn't the highest quality it could have been. What were the circumstances and what did you learn?".
Competency based interviewing is a bit harder, since you first have to figure out what the actual job competencies are and then base some questions around them. The questions won't have "correct" answers, instead they help you - the interviewer - determine how the interviewee thinks/makes decisions and you can then decide how they'll fit into your organization.
In addition, you may want to look at their resume and tailor one or 2 questions based on what they did at companyX. The PDF linked below should give you some idea of what sort of questions to ask.
These questions are only suitable for interviewing politicians. That is, they just test someone's ability to bullshit convincingly. Subjective questions take a long time to think though: more time than is available in an interview. Hence, no answers you will get will be useful in any way.
The example questions are also excessively wordy and written in euphemisms.
STAR interviewing just selects for talented bullshitters. An interview should be novel questions about someone's skill and experience, not a canned sales pitch.
The biggest challenge to the model mentioned in the article is "Will employers value these degrees?" but that's already being solved. The academic system is a great set of hurdles, and most of the time clearing those hurdles is enough of a proof. But employers are already supplementing with other hurdles: programming tests, for example, either homegrown in the recruiting process, or off-the-shelf tests like Codility. The only thing that surprises me is that the shift hasn't already happened.
I'm looking for two things. Did they get accepted into MIT/Caltech/Stanford - or Cambridge/Imperial in my world. OR have they done lots of interesting real work, and possibly completed some of the free online courses from MIT/Stanford/etc.
Having completed a degree from NoWheresVille U is like having 10years experience at Acme corp. Unless you have something else special to offer - I really don't care.
If you're only hiring employees from the top few schools, you're not even vaguely typical as an employer. Which is fine, but it does mean that your response on this topic isn't much of an indication as to how the broader employment market will react.
If you are looking to be a CS graduate entry at a fortune 100 company you are already FSCKED.
Unless you were in the right fraternity at Harvard Bis School you aren't going to climb up the ranks anymore. If you are a non-specialist techie you are going to be outsourced to India, replaced by an H1B, or wherever.
If you are a top school grad you will be snapped up by Google/MSFT/etc. The interesting small companies and startups are looking for either top school grads who don't want to be employee badge #100,000 at Google OR people who have learnt the stuff themselves and done interesting work.
Neither fortune 100 nor startups want people clutching their new degree from the sort of places mentioned in the article
They will be free (or very very cheap) for ever - it's a great business model
There is no threat to MIT/Stanford/etc from running free courses. Even IF somebody decided = I could afford to go there, I could get accepted, I'm not planning to do a startup - but I have decided to only do the online courses instead of attending - their place would immediately be taken by somebody else.
The real impact of these courses is that they destroy the market for 3rd rate universities. Why did you waste your time going to NoWheresVille U when you could have done the MIT courses and something relevant to me as an employer?
A very similar thing happened 10years in the UK. All the community college equivalents were allowed to call themselves universities. All the 'IVY league' were promoting this as 'access for all'.
Of course what it meant was that employers weren't sure if somewhere they hadn't heard of was a decent 2nd tier university or some degree mill - and so to cover themselves began demanding IVY league degrees only.
Since Udacity is not exactly forthcoming on exactly what their business model will be, could you add some insight to exactly what the great business model is? Right now, I see the MITx and Stanford programs being a small loss per student compared to the normal amount universities spend on instruction, but a small loss a hundred thousand times over doesn't exactly turn a profit.
If you are going the freemium route (free content, pay for testing/credentialing) you have the classic freemium dilemma, what is your conversion percentage from free to paid and what is your margin on the paid version. If you anchor your product pricing at zero, you can't exactly charge hundreds or thousands for testing. Plus, the vast majority of students in the Stanford experiment were overseas which makes the paid option at a recognized testing center much more difficult.
It's all a percentage game. Revenue = Total Students * percent who complete the class * percent who can pay for testing * percent who do pay for testing * margin on testing. We ran the numbers in a number of different number of scenarios when we looked at going that exact same route and found time and time again that even if you can break even at a small number of very popular classes, the chances of being able to build out a broad curriculum of classes with less mass appeal was not good.
To use some realistic numbers, let's take the Intro to Databases class and make up some inputs:
Number of students: 90,000
Percent who completed the class: 7.2%
Percent who could take tests at approved centers: est 40%
Percent conversion from free to paid: Classic freemium less than 5%. Hugely optimistic: 20%
So, we have a probable range of $1,300 - $26,000 based on some real numbers and some educated guesses. $26,000 may sound like a lot, but that amount can easily be absorbed just in the professors time prepping and managing the class. Now add on the rest of the overhead of high paid SV engineers, offices, support, etc...
The end result, an enormous amount of things have to go just right in order to cover your base costs. Even if those things go just right, you still have a huge amount of pressure to create classes with the broadest possible appeal with the highest possible number of students completing the course (in order to have a chance of testing revenue). Those market pressures do not coexist well with academic integrity and high standards. They also don't support classes that might "only" have a few thousand students.
There other ways to get to free education for all (we're on that path ourselves), but starting out as free without the backing of a large university is a tough proposition.
The business model of Ivy league free courses is protect the market, destroy competition, preserve monopoly.
At the moment Uni education is a pretty open market, there is Ivy league, there are top state colleges, there are 3rd tier and then the Phoenix type places - you pay your money and take your choice.
The real tough competition, at least in technical subjects, is between ivy league and top state schools. The students can save a lot of money by going to UCB over Stanford, learn exactly the same stuff and get exactly the same job - why pay the extra $100k for a Stanford t-shirt?
What these free courses are saying to the students headed to state Uni outside the top 10, and in fields that don't require a paper qualification (like software) is: don't bother paying to go to UCLA, do a startup or do opensource AND do our courses for free and you will get the same job.
Gradually (at least in CS) UCLA etc will disappear from the market and the employer radar who then see MIT/Stanford vs self taught.
It's really no different from why Nike pay Tiger Woods a zillion $. The idea is to put in the minds of the consumer (or CS student and employer) that there is only Nike or nothing.
Note that new charter does not, unlike WGU, appear to be regionally accredited. This could affect whether or not credits acquired here are recognized by other schools (i.e. graduate programs at more prestigious institutions).
Does anyone know of anything comparable for CS? I have a BA in another field, have been an entrepreneur since my mid-20s and am now a self-taught programmer. I generally don't contract or work full time for other people. But I would like to get a CS degree for personal growth. I can't really justify it being too disruptive so it would have to be:
1) Flexible.
2) Not terribly expensive.
Currently "questionable" accreditation would be ok since I think people's opinion of online schooling is likely to change dramatically over the next decade.
What I'm looking for is an extended CS-related challenge with some manner of official closure at the end. For my own personal satisfaction I would like to say I finished a second degree as opposed to saying I finished some free MIT courses online.
Not to be too self promotional, but we're probably the closest to what you are describing. The biggest limitation is our course catalog is very small to start (bootstrapping). Over the next 12-18 months we should have a much more complete curriculum (Masters in CS/SE focused) as we prep for regional accreditation.
Flexibility? All classes are truly self paced (start immediately, work through the material as fast as you are capable) and include genuine interaction with the professor and real human grading.
Expensive? Basically, $50/$100 per credit depending on whether you need the credentialing and human grading portion. In your situation, our MSE program would end up being less than $4,000 plus books.
We're also Silicon Valley based, and are building the program to exceed the very high standards in the area.
The real point of school is apprenticeship, having someone next to you teach you a subject, answer your questions, challenge you. Unfortunately today's classroom is just an auditorium, a place to listen. Seldom do you meet individuals who want to actually learn something. As M.J. Adler puts it, students just want to learn how to pass the class, and in the process they pass on an education. Online education is great because it does exactly what schools currently do: assess your ability to remember what was said in class.
"Unfortunately today's classroom is just an auditorium, a place to listen."
This is the sad truth. It isn't completely on the students though, there are plenty of teachers out there who would rather just get through the class instead of actually teaching. True teachers seem to be few and far between.
Why are you conflating online education with lectures? Online education is as interactive as the teacher and students choose, just like any other school could be.
I would revise this to say "This will mean that your credits will almost certainly not transfer to any regionally accredited school." Pretty much every college worth going to is regionally accredited. To make this clear, regional accreditation is harder to achieve than national accreditation, yet my local community college and University of Phoenix are both regionally accredited.
On the other hand, you have schools like ITT Tech, which is nationally accredited. This is a school which is notorious for hiding the fact that your credits will likely not transfer to any regionally accredited school.
These are incredibly important things to be aware of before enrolling in any sort of non-traditional school. If you have any desire to use what you've accomplished to move on to, say, a public university, make sure that the classes you're attending will transfer. If the classes you're taking are from a nationally accredited institution, they likely won't.