Thursday, May 16, 2013

The MOOCs Degree

Earlier this week Georgia Tech announced the Online Masters of Science in Computer Science, a MOOCs-based degree with a total tuition of about $7000. This degree came out of a collaboration between Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and my dean Zvi Galil with some significant financial support from AT&T. We've spent several months getting faculty input and buy-in to the program and we're very excited about taking a new leading role in the MOOCs revolution.

We will roll out slowly, with a smaller scale courses to corporate affiliates to work out the kinks and the plan to go to the general public in fall 2014. Read the FAQ to get more information about the program.

It's been fun watching the development of this degree, in particular hearing Sebastian talk about his MOOC 2.0 plans to scale courses with a small amount of expense that we pull from the tuition. No doubt we will have challenges in making this degree truly work at a large scale but I'm truly bullish that we'll a self-sustaining quality Masters program that will reach tens if not hundreds of thousands of students.

Here we go.

9 comments:

  1. Good luck!!

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  2. Lance don't you want to prepare job market results for this year?

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    1. Be patient. The job market in CS is still hopping.

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  3. Lance, while I congratulate you and your department for your efforts to go online, it is imperative to understand that such courses will not be able to replace more traditional ones. even ordinary courses can fail to provide, but with online courses it becomes more wishy-washy ... it's all a marketing gig after all ... just like cloud computing ...

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  4. While this is clearly the direction of the future, can you discuss some more about why this will not kill off academia as we know it?

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    1. faculty who hate actually dealing with classes and students see this as a way to break away from the schedule of classes and the direct interactions with students so they can spend more time on their research but don't realize that academia will not support their research once budgets are slashed since the professors are no longer needed to teach their courses

      been watching newspapers the past decade or so? get ready for it in academia in the next decade or so

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  5. didn't y'all run a MOOC on how to run a MOOC that imploded recently?

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  6. The race to the bottom is going quite well.

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  7. Rice professor Moshi Vardi's prediction is coming true for professors too, per Slashdot's recent story "Rice Professor Predicts Humans Out of Work In 30 Years"

    To speed the evolution of MOOCS toward 100%-AI no-professor institutions, it is merely necessary to announce, at the start of each class, that at the end of the class, tuition will be refunded in cash to the 1/3 of enrolled students whose tutorial sessions are evaluated as "most helpful" (by their fellow students), and that tuition will be refunded triple to the individual student-tutor who is voted "most helpful."

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