Georgia Institute of Technology is offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). They’ll teach classes on the web, open to anyone who wants to enroll, and charge $6,600/year if you want graded tests and a degree at the end.
According to the New York Time this represents the “new frontier of study online.”
The disruption may be approaching, though, as Georgia Tech, which has one of the country’s top computer science programs, plans to offer a MOOC-based online master’s degree in computer science for $6,600 — far less than the $45,000 on-campus price . . . This is the first deliberate and thoughtful attempt to apply education technology to bringing instruction to scale.
Hold. The. Motherf*$^&g. Phone.
The “new frontier of study online?” Are they serious?
Want to know what the new frontier of study online REALLY is? I’ll give you a hint: It was invented in 1996.
It is called Google.
And “the first deliberate and thoughtful attempt to apply education technology to bringing instruction to scale?” Where the hell was this guy when Udemy and Skillshare came out?
MOOCs aren’t disruptive. They are 15 years late and absurdly priced. MOOCs are just the universities’ attempt to insulate themselves from real disruption.
But the NYT seems earnest. They REALLY believe MOOCs are disruptive. And I buy their conviction. So now the real question:
How, in God’s name, can the NYT think that a $6,600/year online course is new or disruptive in a world where Google, Udemy, Skillshare, and countless others are delivering the same thing for 1/100th of the price?
Best guess? Because the Times knows what we all do: people don’t go to college for the education. They go for the accreditation. And Google, Udemy, and Skillshare don’t sell that. That’s why the universities offering MOOCs think they can offer the actual education for free and STILL get people to pay thousands of dollars afterwards, not for the knowledge but for a piece of paper saying they were enrolled.
Stanford is accredited. MIT is accredited. And GIT is accredited. Get a degree from any of those places and now you’re accredited, too.
But learn something on your own? Not accredited. Not valid. Not worth it. See:
From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the courses have not yet produced profound change, partly because they offer no credit and do not lead to a degree.
See that? It wouldn’t matter if Battushig could build a Pacific Rim robot out of spare parts in his garage. It’s not about what he is capable of doing. It’s not about the quality of his education. It doesn’t matter if he could change the world.
He’s not accredited.
What really matters, according to the NYT, is a degree. That’s how “profound change” occurs. Not by building anything of value, but by earning your stamp from an accredited institution.
Pictured above: Battushig’s homemade infrared pen that turns any projection to a smart board. Right: a piece of vellum paper. According to the NYT, only one of these qualifies as “profound change.”
But I digress, back to the question at hand.
How can the NYT mistake MOOCs for a disruption?
Well, take a minute to Google “accredited” and you’ll see why. The number one synonym is “authorized.”
Universities sell authorized education.
MOOCs are the first online education authorized by universities. Authorized, in turn, by the NYT.
So there you go. First in the space. Shifting people out of the physical classroom. Disruption!
…except obviously not.
Disruption is when you redefine the terms of competition. When instead of selling faster horses, you sell automobiles. GIT isn’t doing that. They are still selling the same product: accreditation. They haven’t redefined the terms of competition.. All they changed is the distribution method and the price point.
Sorry, NYT, that ain’t disruption.
The real disruption is not that the universities found another way to deliver rubber stamps over the internet.
The real disruption is that people have woken up to the fact that they don’t want or need the university’s rubber stamps anymore.
What they want is education. Skills. A means of income. Happiness.
They have had access to those things without the university for a long time now. And they are starting to take advantage, as EVIDENCED by the creation of the MOOCs.
The disruption caused the MOOCs, not the other way around. People have woken up, and college’s are scared.
The end of the authorized life
Authorized education is being disrupted by actual education. People are realizing they don’t need a diploma to get a job. They don’t need a high GPA to prove they’re smart. What they need is the ability to create.
This is the real disruption. The shift from the accredited economy to the creation economy. Where you’ll be measured not by your GPA, but by what you can actually do for the world.
More importantly, it is the shift from seeking authorization to granting yourself permission. Where you will measure yourself not by your GPA, but by what you can actually do for the world.
You have been able to educate yourself since the day you were born. You should absolutely seek out teachers, but you DO NOT need a school. You don’t need authorization to learn. So don’t buy the authorized life. Don’t sign up to pay for MOOCs from prestigious universities – they are giving away the actual knowledge for free!
Instead, go MAKE something. Despite what the NYT would have you believe, it isn’t the diploma that has value. It’s what you can do.
Remember Battushig? The Mongolian kid who didn’t count as “profound change” because he wasn’t enrolled in the degree program. He changed the world. Not because he eventually went and got his rubber stamp from MIT, but because he built his own Wiimote Smartboard and used it to better his community.
Change something. Make your education manifest. Build a car, start a blog, or work consciously on destroying the beliefs that make your life less than it could be. Do something. Without permission.
Life an unauthorized life.
Now get to it.
4 thoughts on “The Latest, Brilliant College Conspiracy To Rip You Off”
F*ck.. nowbody replied this post? lol.
Great post. I didn’t need to pay for my CS degree, but I need to pay for my second degree in Bio Engineering. I will be paying to network, use campus research facilities, and to have access to funding. So no, I won’t be paying for an education but for its support.
…but maybe the internet can get my all that support too. What are you thoughts?
So this is a good point. Not all degrees are created equal. As far as I know, Bio Engineering is tough to practice outside of a university setting (CS is getting increasingly easy with bootcamps and other learning programs).
I don’t know the answer, but the question as always is: Can I do better for 30K (or whatever it costs) and 4 years (or however long it takes) in terms of achieving my goals. Part of that requires you to define your goals, which is something most students don’t do 😉
For fields where you can create a product on your own, this may be true. My first career was in software development and I had no formal education in the subject – my portfolio got me my first 9-5, and then experience and references took me from there.
That being said, there are many, many fields where a certification is not a bureaucratic road-block, but a valuable tool in the field. Imagine a world with self-educated doctors! While MDs are some of the brightest people, and are certainly capable of teaching themselves, removing the road-block of certification opens the doors to charlatans. And medicine is just one example. Any field with a low barrier to entry is going to have a lot of entrants trying to take advantage. Having credentials streamlines the hiring process. While it was fine for my HR department to review my portfolio, it would be onerous for everyone to have to do that kind of vetting for their doctors.
If anything, I think a real revolution in education would move in the opposite direction – not less barriers but more of them. Right now, a degree is oftentimes the only way to prove competency in a field. It is expensive in time and money, and people choose it because it is the only option. If there were more options – things like certification tests – that could allow one to show that they have been independently verified to have a set of skills/knowledge (rather than just claiming to have them) that would be disruptive. Which, in a way, is what GIT is offering.
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