Sunday, 27 May 2012

Beyond the College Degree, Online Educational Badges

With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses and other online programs offering informal credentials, the race is on for alternative forms of certification that would be widely accepted by employers.“Who needs a university anymore?” asked David Wiley, a Brigham Young University professor who is an expert on the new courses, known as MOOCs. “Employers look at degrees because it’s a quick way to evaluate all 300 people who apply for a job. But as soon as there’s some other mechanism that can play that role as well as a degree, the jig is up on the monopoly of degrees.”

By the end of this year, Mr. Wiley predicted, it will become familiar to hear of people who earned alternative credentials online and got high-paying jobs at Google or other high-visibility companies. “Udacity may help that process along,” he said of the startup company offering two MOOCs this semester taught by prominent engineers. Mozilla, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and others are working to devise a system of online educational “badges” certifying exactly which skills had been learned. Some companies, like Microsoft, already offer their own certificates for trained computer technicians.

Some educators doubt that such credentials will ever command as much respect as a diploma from a well-known college. And of course, to be trustworthy, alternative credentials would have to be at least as cheat-proof as traditional ones. And that is not so simple.At Stanford University , where Jennifer Widom, the chairwoman of the computer science department, taught an online database course last semester to more than 90,000 people, some found a covert route to high scores.

“There were definitely people getting multiple accounts and using some to practice and the other to get a perfect score,” said Dr. Widom, who still has hundreds of assignments trickling in every day for grading. “There were some who completed the exam with a perfect score in three minutes and the only way they could have done that was if they had already done the problems in another account. My philosophy was not to be concerned in the least about people who cheat. But if there’s going to be actual certification that people depend on, those problems will have to be addressed.”

At Udacity, the plan is to deal with cheating — and help ensure the validity of the credential — by offering students a global network of in-person testing centers. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this semester’s pilot course in a new MOOC venture known as MITx, will be on the honor system, but officials have begun to explore the possibility of using proctored test sites.In both cases, the courses will be free, but the testing — and the credential — will have a price tag.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com

No comments:

Post a Comment