Book author Azat Mardan writes about apps, startups and technology
For those who aren’t familiar with the context of this quote here is a meme. The meaning is simple: why spend in the magnitude of $150,000 on professional knowledge that is available virtually for free thanks to the Internet?
For those who aren’t familiar with the context of this quote here is a meme. The meaning is simple: why spend in the magnitude of $150,000 on professional knowledge that is available virtually for free thanks to the Internet?
Massive open online course or MOOC — is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources.wiki
Up until recently, online courses were just poor imitations of traditional lectures captured on video camera. MOOCs emerged a few years ago with pioneers such as Coursera. They’ve become more and more popular as supplementary, continuing or even as a replacement for traditional education.
Here is a brief overview of free online courses:
These courses like Open Classroom are less comprehensive than MOOCs and usually lack discussion boards, tests and certification:
These websites offer a wide variety of classes at relatively small cost:
For those who need a degree, the online education approach offers greater flexibility than a conventional one; various degrees can be earned part-time, at your own location and at a cheaper cost. Here are the most trusted (and in most cases accredited) options:
A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration.wiki
Screencasts have become a very popular learning tool for programmers and IT professionals. Here are some top screencast websites for cutting-edge technologies such as Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and NodeJS:
Here are some common hot trends which emerged in the past couple years in online education:
Not always the old pro-verb “you’re getting what you pay for it” is right. In the past decade, the cost of conventional education has skyrocketed due to easily available student loans but efficiency stayed pretty much the same. The general trend is that education and online education especially is getting more efficient. MOOCs allow dozens of thousands of students to partake in a single course. Although, there are many regulated professions such as ones in medical or law fields where traditional degrees are a necessity, for the vast majority of IT jobs, portfolios and GitHub “resumes” have become more important than GPAs or names of prestigious colleges in the hiring process. It might be too early to say what impact these initiatives will have on hiring especially in big (conservative) corporations, but with high motivation and great materials most people can achieve amazing results in study without getting into debt.
In conclusion, my personal favorite MOOC website is Udacity. I even bought a T-shirt to support them. Would you pay thousands dollars for almost the same quality of materials? I wouldn’t but then I already have Master’s Degree from traditional university :-) So are MOOCs only for continued education? What do you think?
