What happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT classes

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/what-happens-when-people-in-pakistan-start-taking-mit-classes/277580/

by capex • 13 years ago

47 49 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

e3pi2• 13 years ago

"Coursera has taken the lead in responding. The company announced in May that it was partnering with several organizations, including the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation in Ukraine, to provide subtitling for lectures in select courses in Arabic, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian."

Like the pro bono of lawyers, Senator Ron Wyden(Oregon), the senator attacking PRISM, etc, should legislate all those thousands(?) of language specialists of the NSA and CIA be required to translate MOOC courses for our third world brothers and sisters. All these specialists could learn new subjects too.

Wouldn't that be nice?

mayneack• 13 years ago

Wyden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden

e3pi2• 13 years ago

Thank you. I still had time to edit correction.

ommunist• 13 years ago

It may end up with Al-Quran classes in Massachusets.

daliusd• 13 years ago

Those who will learn this class will be accused that they learn from wrong source. I was accused once for reading wrong bible :) I'm not even very religious.

rowanseymour3• 13 years ago

The growth of MOOCs is clearly massive for the developing world where access to high quality educational resources is limited, but what does it mean for countries like the US? Can a person get the same quality of education from online courses as traditional courses? Can those courses be graded and accredited in a way which means something to employers? Or are we forever stuck in a model of higher education where graduating from a prestigious university is the only thing that matters, and you pay more for the prestige than the actual education itself?

ulrikrasmussen2• 13 years ago

I guess that since these MOOCs are essentially online study groups with very minimal direct interaction with professors/teaching assistants, it is very hard to verify that a student actually did all the work without help from others. Since educations are essentially tickets to getting job interviews, the incentives for cheating are high. I think that is indeed a problem which needs to be addressed. Maybe by introducing course centers where participants can take an online exam under controlled conditions, i.e., in the presence of observers?

rowanseymour3• 13 years ago

That seems to be direction that some organisations are taking MOOCs. I know here Rwanda, there's new pilot program called Kepler[1] which is going to use MOOCs as the primary teaching tool, but have students sit exams (under observation) for a "competency based" degree offered by a university in the US.

[1] http://cloudmeetscampus.com/

vidarh2• 13 years ago

Open University in the UK offers distance learning, but all exams are taken in person - the have long offered exam centres all over the world.

They do also offer e-mail and phone contact with advisors for many courses, and for most courses grades also partially depend on assessment of mandatory assignments 2-4 times during the course.

Of course this comes at a substantially higher cost than these MOOCs seems to do. Presumably there'll be space for some "in between" variations that offers monitoring of just the exams for example.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

You can probably get the same education if you put in sufficient effort, but going to top level universities is also about the contacts you forge with likeminded people, often in specific social strata, as well as being able to interact in person with top people in the field.

Of course you can get the contacts elsewhere if you make the effort, but the university system is extremely well placed to bring people together for extended periods of time and put them in situations that encourages bonding, and that provides a lot of value.

Frankly, not taking better advantage of that is what I miss the most about cutting my studies short (I left university to co-found my first company; I went back and completed a MSc via correspondence courses, and it served the purpose of documenting my skills, but it wasn't the same without that daily social interaction with people working on the same things).

MOOCs can probably lift the low end, and make the basic education a commodity, but universities will still serve a lot of other purposes. I could even see "universities" pop up for people to attend to take MOOCs from suppliers with top teachers for the main teaching and "just" offering support services and networking/bonding opportunities around that. E.g. universities have long used books from outside their own university, so it just makes sense for them to make use of other resources, including whole courses, when there are ones available elsewhere where they can't compete on the lectures themselves and focus on their strong points.

pcrh• 13 years ago

With a modicum of commitment, it is of course possible to learn the technical content of a course online or by correspondence. However, contacts are not the only (or even the main) benefit of attending a top university such as Harvard, Cambridge or MIT. Putting a group of similarly intelligent young people together in an environment that fosters learning and exchange is just as important -- students learn as much from each other as from their teachers. And the manner in which they learn is formed by the environment, which imposes certain expectations with respect to intellectual rigor and creativity.

This is how the top universities continue to stay on top despite there being only a small difference in the quality of the students studying there, and virtually no difference in course content, compared to those just beneath them in the various rankings.

gngeal3• 13 years ago

Can a person get the same quality of education from online courses as traditional courses? Can those courses be graded and accredited in a way which means something to employers?

What about the overall success of http://www.open.ac.uk ? Apparently, distance learning is acknowleged by employers.

angersock• 13 years ago

I'm pleased to see the English language spreading again as a universal language of learning and engineering.

No, I am in no way going to benefit from this as a murrican. :)

capex• 13 years ago

The typical Pakistani education glosses over the real deal, the fundamental understanding of a topic. MOOCs are changing that. The qualification wouldn't get people interviews in Pakistan, but it would enhance their understanding nonetheless.

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

Their own military industrial complex might start to flourish? I suppose it depends on what classes are available online.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_Arms_Industry

dschiptsov3• 13 years ago

MIT placed lots of courses online long before MOOC boom.

Nowadays Coursera is the dominant MOOC platform with some very decent courses, at least on CS/AI/Neuroscience subjects.

Yale is another source of high quality materials, while Berkeley sucks after rewriting its site and removing bunch of old courses, including classic Scheme based CS 61A and courses on Buddhism studies.

WalterGR2• 13 years ago

Berkeley sucks after rewriting its site and removing bunch of old courses, including classic Scheme based CS 61A and courses on Buddhism studies.

The oldest CS61A I found on http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science is spring 2008. It's taught by Brian Harvey and is Scheme-based: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL...

dschiptsov3• 13 years ago

Yeah, this is the best version available, while he is still using classic text terminal. So classy.))

xerophtye• 13 years ago

I see a lot of untapped technological potential in Pakistan. In the past decade they have set records for some of the youngest tech wiz kids in the world, with the youngest nearly 9 years old with a Microsoft certification! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arfa_Karim

Tloewald3• 13 years ago

I think that if you had an incredibly bright kid in a first world country you probably would have more interesting things for that kid to do than get a Microsoft Certification. (And it totally sucks she died at 16.)

CmonDev• 13 years ago

They don't give you a diploma though. And I bet it would be a separate kind of diploma. And it's not just degree but also connections. An ex-MIT is likely to hire another ex-MIT. So not much is happening at the moment.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

I learned more from the clubs I joined and/or formed in university than I did from the lectures.

I do wonder whether, as the technical content becomes more widely accessible, there'll be

A) A premium put on conscientiousness.

and

B) Whether clubs for specific topics will become more popular.

The second one is very ... odd ... because it would seem to require either a provision for local spaces that isn't currently there (but might be as libraries change) or much better tools for online communities.

gngeal3• 13 years ago

I learned more from the clubs I joined and/or formed in university than I did from the lectures.

However, it's great for schizoid people who may not have the same options that you had.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

Hmm?

If we look at one of the main virtues of uni as being the people it lets you meet, then I'd have thought that solitary people wouldn't have much of an advantage from attending a brick and mortar as compared to a correspondence course or similar.

Though I suppose one might argue that access to experts is important, that's - to my mind - a much more dicey proposition.

Do you mean that the nature of university is such that they'll be forced to make friends?

Tloewald3• 13 years ago

I think it's hard to quantify amount learned from X vs. Y, speaking as a student who goofed off almost all the time I was in college, there's still stuff from classes I took nearly thirty years ago that gives me fresh insights.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

Twenty-five-year-old Khalid Raza lives in Shakargarh but is taking "The Challenges of Global Poverty," a course taught by a former adviser to the World Bank and a professor of international economics at MIT.

Great. Now the whole world can get indoctrinated into neo-liberal economics and the like, and the educated in all countries can adopt the ideology of the ruiling empire. /s

Now, while this is indeed great for hard sciences, medicine and technology, it's very problematic for ideological and soft courses, from History to Economics to Sociology etc.

It might not be clear, but imagine the inverse: American students getting their sociology knowledge from Pakistani scholars -- with the whole ideological baggage that will carry with respect to the treatment of women, issues of personal freedom, etc.

The same harm works both ways.

Tloewald3• 13 years ago

"Harm"? Seems to me that learning about other cultures is very seldom harmful -- in either direction. In any event, I fail to see how exposing people in pakistan to our ideological baggage would be a bad thing overall -- they're already getting ideological baggage from hellfire missiles.

thiagoharry• 13 years ago

As a brazilian, I personally have the impression that the teachings in humanities in the USA is very biased towards neo-liberalism, pro-market and right-wing ideologies when I compare what's produced in brazilian and north american universities. This is probably because in the USA the universities are private, there's no free, autonomous and statal universities. And probably it's consequence of the cold war years, when left wing ideologies were seen as suspect. If I could choose a place to study computer science, engineering or science in general, I would choose some north-american university like MIT. But if I could choose a place to study humanities, specially economy or social science, I wouldn't choose a north-american university. Just my (perhaps equivocated) opinion. But it's an opinion shared by many people in humanities here.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

* "Harm"? Seems to me that learning about other cultures is very seldom harmful -- in either direction.*

Or course. My comment was against "learning about" another culture, it was against being educated only in the "other culture's" ways of seeing. Especially if it's a hegemonic culture.

There are lots of cases (in lesser countries) where people that have gone through that return indoctrinated with concepts that belong to the ideology of the country the studied, and often with concepts that reflect it's low opinion on their own country and promote it's interests.

For example, Europeans that have studied economics in the US tend to come back as neo-liberals and wanting to abolish the welfare state etc.

I'm speaking mostly for fields like economics, political sciences, history, diplomacy, etc, not stuff like literary theory (of which noone cares about in either place).

seivan• 13 years ago

Fuck, how the hell can this be the first comment at the top?!

coldtea3• 13 years ago

Because people found that it has something insightful to add to the conversation? Even as a wrong opinion to be corrected with their comments.

Now why does your content-free comment deserves to be here?

DanBC• 13 years ago

The flood of new users refuse to downvote anything.

swalsh• 13 years ago

from History to Economics to Sociology etc

On the other hand, on the internet finding FALSE information is so easy. A lot of times its in a form thats actually easier to consume. Its important to have these courses equally available to help combat dangerous ignorance.

Stwerner• 13 years ago

I just finished Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City the other day, and after reading this article, I'm really excited to see how his theory about education level being a major factory in whether a city succeeds or not is affected.

I doubt we'll see any short term changes, but in places that don't have good access to education (or in places with an education system like Feynman experienced in Brazil) I can't help but wonder what kind of changes the world is going to experience as average global education level skyrockets due to MOOCs.

mapmeld• 13 years ago

The article tells a short anecdote, but does not discuss motivation or future plans of the student, popularity of the program in Pakistan, whether schools and other institutions in Pakistan may start using MOOC material like community colleges in the US... at the end of the day this article does not tell us what happens at all.

jjindev• 13 years ago

This is slightly tangential, but bear with me. I'm mid-50's, and when I started programming it was a weird thing. I'd say I was a computer programmer, and I might have been the first one that normal people had actually met.

It is amazing now to see the world buried in programmers (and more being produced with people from Pakistan & etc. in Coursera's Startup Engineering).

More amazing that a lot of really good work is being done.

So how does it graph? Plateau or Vinge-ian take-off?

Is the flocking around software apps appropriate or an over-concentration of human capital?

frozenport• 13 years ago

Admitably coursera classes arent starting from much, I was part of a parralel programming class mirrored on coursera and those folks did 4 I weeks of our semester class without the final project. I wonder if we will see a cheapening siniliar to ted talks

newsign• 13 years ago

Universities offering degrees thru MOOC will bring revolution in terms of employment/unemployment and labor market in general .... i can foresee a scenario where for every single job position there will be lot more international applicant ready to work remotely 10 times cheaper than the same qualified person in 1st world countries ...

What happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT classes

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