It's great that access to higher education material is becoming more open. This is already a big step.

Certification / getting a top-level university degree is unfortunately something completely different.

Splitting those two is part of the business model of all the participating universities.

Nevertheless these changes might provide the possibility for more people who want to learn (and have the abilities) to get discovered and so finally also get access to certification.

What's the next step from here to replacing "a college education" all together? Of course I can't walk into a job offer and explain to them how I watched coursera videos online, but I'm wondering what the path from A to B will be.

The path forward will be made by the people who take these classes succeeding at various projects. Much like traditional schools increase their reputation via the achievements of their alumni, so will the MOOCs. You're seeing some success stories already, but wait until someone high profile credits their success to what they learned at Coursera or Udacity.

On another front, the first traditional school has decided to award credit for a Udacity class, if the student takes a proctored test. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/education/colorado-state-t...

We're just about a year out from that first Thrun/Norvig Stanford AI class. Things have moved very quickly when you put it in that perspective.

I don't think it will ever happen "all together". For hard sciences you still need expensive labs and hands-on training. For medical schools, I'd prefer that an operating surgeon had some practical experience as well.

But a good portion of the courses (that frequently happen to be taught by TAs, not professors, anyways) belong online. One finicky part at the moment is testing, which relies on honor code, so there might be a move towards professional-level testing, the type you see for major exams (GRE, TOEFL) as well as professional certifications. Since most of the testing facilities charge money, it will probably provide a good reason for universities to charge for credits as well - you can still view the course for free, but to pass a series of tests and get credit you would have to pay.

>Of course I can't walk into a job offer and explain to them how I watched coursera videos online...

Yes you can. I would put you very close to the front of the line for my group (data science) if you told me you self-taught yourself ML using Ng's classes and could show me some samples on GitHub.

I think the next step will be proctored exams, like edX just introduced. With proctored exams, the student can prove that s(he) really did succeed. After that, all that's needed is time. As with any cultural shift, newer generations are comfortable with things the previous generation wouldn't even dream of.

One path is people working , that need to learn something(say machine learning) for their jobs, and doing so online with the knowledge of their workplace.

If the result is good , it'll warm some workplaces to online courses.

Another path is using the fact that graduates of online courses can achieve a specific learning goal much cheaper and much shorter(in some jobs people don't need a full degree , only some courses). This opens a path for cheaper employees for companies and a solution for the talent crunch. Maybe some more venturesome companies will start using it. And the word will get out and it will become more common.

We're a long ways from that point, but you're right. There's currently a "rush" on getting educational materials as content. I think it'll take a couple more years to really polish up the content delivery strategies, but it's rapidly developing.

throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube? These classes are interactive. Most of them involve are weekly quizes, midterm and final exams and automatically graded programming assignments. There are deadlines for all of these, and if your performance is good enough, you get a certificate with a grade. And they're all free and massive (coursera has millions of students).

I haven't heard about the online Illinois courses before, sorry. Were they free? Were they truly massive? Were they offered to anyone, even to highschool students or unemployed bartenders in Uganda?

And even if these courses aren't truly innovating, the point is they're making MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) popular and available to millions of people.

I'm a highschool student from Greece. In the last year, I've learned AI, ML, NLP (although my performance wasn't good enough to get a certificate from this class), SaaS and Algorithms through MOOCs. All these from some of the world's best professors. I even was a community TA in the second offering of the SaaS class because of my performance in the first offering. Coursera (I've only taken one udacity class, and edX is new) is changing my life.

Please answer honestly: Could I do these things 2 years ago?

In this sense, education is changing.

This isn't some mail-order-MBA-translated-to-the-internet, your Illinois example is apples and oranges.

In fact it's not even about course credit. It's free. People from Africa, South America, India, China and so forth are getting access to professors at Ivy League universities.

That's a big deal in my book!

Yes, One professor can throw some videos on youtube, but this is a structured environment to bring full courses to students. And more importantly, it's a 'hot' idea right now, it seems professors left and right are coming out of the woodworks to join in.

So yes, education is certainly changing. It's hard to say where to exactly, but something is stirring - and I think it's good.

And this: http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-to-the-World-From/1340...

Quality. Followed by quantity.

There is a huge difference between taping lectures and 'throwing them on youtube' and offering a comprehensive package that is specifically tailored for online learning use only. And that is definitely the direction we seem to be in now, and I for one am very exited about.

I think the big next question is how this will affect the institutions as we know it. We are already borderline on accepting certificates from these courses.

As the quality and the number of courses increases you get an incentive not to enroll in an expensive program, or competition from more people who got a similar education for free.

I can see the khan angle to better the world for everybody, but I wouldn't be surprised if the next coursera generation costs money.

You can be in any part of the world to take these online course. As long as one has a decent internet connection, willingness to study, has time (effort) to devote to the offering they can take the course and learn. I think this can be deemed progress.

I think it boils down to critical mass. There are more and more people with an increase of quality. In addition, the overall community aspect developed by remote students has really taken off. I don't think you can look at it so much as "how is this different from this" as you can just see the relative size of each. Lastly, while those technologies and offerings may have existed in the past, computers and web content have never been as accessible as they are now. And that is only going to increase.

This will be more obvious in developing countries, who do not have large education budgets. US schools have a decent supply of decent courses - you could take a Cryptography course from Stanford, but you don't have to, as there's probably one at your local university anyways.

Someone involved in higher education in poorer countries could utilize these courses as a base material, and have local TAs grade assignments and facilitate in-class discussions.

  > Exactly how?

Some people think that there is some magic technology which can let you learn a lot of stuff without putting some effort, without engaging your memory, without doing boring stuff. That video somehow is better than live interaction.

I'll just ignore them—saw to many itching for the change without understanding what exactly the problem is.