This is a nice overview. I'm up and down on the Coursera courses as they seem to be hit or miss, at times incomplete, at times easy A material and at times intractable. There really is no good progression from A to B and that is fine if you are a true autodidact as I am, but for those who are considering this, or any collection of OCW as a replacement from standard education, I would strongly suggest not doing this.
The problem with Coursera, IMO, is that despite the promise of free education for all, the very large amount of courses with a broad spectrum of usefulness and difficulty makes it too difficult to navigate and can cost a student hours of wasted time watching videos that may be far beneath or above the student's abilities. I would suggest Coursera creates a pre-exam section for all the courses so the student can have a slightly better understanding of what they are signing up for. Hell, they are promoting themselves as a Machine Learning repository, can't they do a basic suggest-a-course section based on pre-exams?
With that said, I love the idea of Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. and what they promote. I am one of those people who, despite being American, had zero chance of ever getting into college due to the quality of my inner-city high school and financial circumstances. Of course, the issue is that if you do grow up in this circumstance, you probably won't be able to take advantage of the free education because you may not have a computer. Regardless, anyone who wishes to partake can join with little more investment than a $200 computer from Walmart, so the financial excuse isn't quite the barrier that it once was.
How much opportunity do any of these courses open up? How much do employers give a hoot about a silly certificate from a pseudo-school that rides on the backs of watered-down Ivy League classes? Employers still take a degree from DeVry more seriously than the scattered layout of MOOC, and until this is changed, there will never be tangible proof or progress in the sphere.
I could tell employers all day that I read, and worked through, SICP and Cormen, but why should they care? They shouldn't because there was no one around to tell me my code is wrong. I can show employers websites I built using exotic languages such as Clojure, but why should they care when I can't pass a basic whiteboard test? I could tell them that I can proficiently write in x y z language, but they don't care and they shouldn't. To all of those people who suggest that employers don't care about your background education and only care about the projects you worked on, I challenge you to point out how many of your coworkers don't have at least something that resembles a Formal Education (TM). Coursera is not a Formal Education (TM). The proof will come if, and only if, one day a student self-learned from Coursera with a large portfolio with self-projects nails a job over a kid from MIT with no portfolio. No one, at this point, can seriously say this is happening and a convincing scale.
It's not the silly certificate that you should value from these courses, it the learning itself.
I think you overestimate the utility of formal qualifications for getting a programming job (assuming that that's what you're talking about here). In fact I would say that if tell a potential employer that you've worked through SICP, you show them some projects that you've done and they reject you on the basis of not having a degree, you've dodged a bullet!
I'm completely self taught. I haven't got a degree, nor have I worked though SICP. I'm in my mid 30s and I've been professionally programming for about 5-6 years. I work at a hedge fund in London; it's doable!
You know that a coursera-taught team won a (non-academic) machine-learning competition, right? Knock-on articles about it made the rounds here a few weeks back.
The winners were a mechanical engineering student, an actuary, and an insurance risk analyst. This is all neat, but I was refering specifically to students w/ no education using these courses as a replacement for college.
Yes, as an add-on, I give it a huge Plus 1, but as a replacement, not yet. I'm not saying there is no hope, I'm saying it's not quite there yet.
Why can't you pass a basic whiteboard test? Haven't you learnt what you need doing the projects you mentioned?
By whiteboard test, I assume you refer to a coding problem given at an interview. I can see that it can be very difficult to get an interview without formal credentials, but once there, wouldn't your experience allow you to shine?
I never did a whiteboard test, so I guess I don't know how I'd do, but I can't imagine that I would blow anyone away. I'd probably be asked a stupid-simple question for say, a Junior, but give an algorithm or answer that would quickly expose my inexperience, lack of ability, and lack of training / guidance.
To be clear, I wasn't exactly stating my own credentials in that post, I was simply stating that even with said credentials, there is little chance of being taken seriously. I never read Corman, but the rest is fairly accurate.
It's my experience that if you acquire the skills and talk to enough people about them, the opportunities will present themselves. It's not just big companies out there, there's a lot of smaller ones who can't compete with google in hiring PhDs. These are a good place to build credentials that you can carry you to the larger institutions, if that's where you want to be.
Nice write up. While I might disagree with you on certain points, without any proof on my part, I completely agree that one should take open courses almost exclusively only if s/he wants to learn something new for themselves. I get a huge kick from learning new stuff. If anything I started with class on algorithms in hopes to land a job at Google, well I never did, but it gave me taste for knowledge that is hard to satisfy. :)
The problem with Coursera, IMO, is that despite the promise of free education for all, the very large amount of courses with a broad spectrum of usefulness and difficulty makes it too difficult to navigate and can cost a student hours of wasted time watching videos that may be far beneath or above the student's abilities. I would suggest Coursera creates a pre-exam section for all the courses so the student can have a slightly better understanding of what they are signing up for. Hell, they are promoting themselves as a Machine Learning repository, can't they do a basic suggest-a-course section based on pre-exams?
With that said, I love the idea of Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. and what they promote. I am one of those people who, despite being American, had zero chance of ever getting into college due to the quality of my inner-city high school and financial circumstances. Of course, the issue is that if you do grow up in this circumstance, you probably won't be able to take advantage of the free education because you may not have a computer. Regardless, anyone who wishes to partake can join with little more investment than a $200 computer from Walmart, so the financial excuse isn't quite the barrier that it once was.
How much opportunity do any of these courses open up? How much do employers give a hoot about a silly certificate from a pseudo-school that rides on the backs of watered-down Ivy League classes? Employers still take a degree from DeVry more seriously than the scattered layout of MOOC, and until this is changed, there will never be tangible proof or progress in the sphere.
I could tell employers all day that I read, and worked through, SICP and Cormen, but why should they care? They shouldn't because there was no one around to tell me my code is wrong. I can show employers websites I built using exotic languages such as Clojure, but why should they care when I can't pass a basic whiteboard test? I could tell them that I can proficiently write in x y z language, but they don't care and they shouldn't. To all of those people who suggest that employers don't care about your background education and only care about the projects you worked on, I challenge you to point out how many of your coworkers don't have at least something that resembles a Formal Education (TM). Coursera is not a Formal Education (TM). The proof will come if, and only if, one day a student self-learned from Coursera with a large portfolio with self-projects nails a job over a kid from MIT with no portfolio. No one, at this point, can seriously say this is happening and a convincing scale.