What’s Wrong With an Online Degree?
Is an online college education better or worse than first-person learning?
Leave it to the geeks at MIT to transform one of the world’s best four-year college educations into a completely virtual experience. This isn’t some no-tech degree offered by DeVry (not that there’s anything wrong with that). This is the real thing. By the 2006-2007 school year, MIT will be offering online coursework — video lectures, study materials, tests, and answers — online for free.
You still have to pay if you want to earn course credit, but what you don’t have to do is leave your dorm room. On Thursday’s show Leo and Patrick want to know if you would like to earn your college degree online. Is watching a lecture on the Web better or worse than sitting in the 50th row of a lecture hall? Vote in our online poll and post your opinions in the Talkback section below.
Here’s the story
Cnet’s News.com reports on MIT’s experimental pilot program to offer all of its 2000 courses online. The program, called MIT OpenCourseWare (we geeks love those intercaps) is based on the open-source model of software development. It currently offers online material for 32 classes, with more on the way.
“We are fighting the commercialization of knowledge,” says MIT spokesman Jon Paul Potts in the Cnet article, “much in the same way that open-source people are fighting the commercialization of software.”
As we mentioned before, the MIT online coursework is not meant to replace an MIT degree. Only accepted, paying MIT students can use the materials to earn course credits. However, MIT hopes that the world will benefit from free access to this information, even if it doesn’t come with an MIT diploma.
This could potentially mean an end to traditional lecture classes at MIT and colleges across the nation. Already, Cnet reports, MIT professors are noticing lower classroom attendance. Hey, that’s what they get for giving an 8 a.m. lecture.
What do you think?
Is an online college coursework as good as real-life learning? Does it depend on the coursework? Are online classes suitable for a technical education, but not for the liberal arts? Would you want to go to college online? Post your thoughts in the Talkback section below the poll or join the discussion on our message boards.