[HN Gopher] MIT MicroMasters
___________________________________________________________________
MIT MicroMasters
Author : tosh
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-01-15 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (micromasters.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (micromasters.mit.edu)
| burlesona wrote:
| This material looks very cool, it's great that it's free and I'm
| sure the quality coming from MIT is high.
|
| But having now completed both a degree in-person and a degree
| online... I have to question the value of online education if
| you're _serious_ about progressing in a field, not just casually
| interested in a subject.
|
| With in-person programs, even at a low-prestige local college,
| you gain a network of people who you can collaborate with in your
| community, and those relationships are at least half the value of
| the program (if not more). With an online program that just
| doesn't happen. Of course some people will post exceptions, but
| I've done both and online is just not the same.
|
| I wonder what we're expecting from online education. For casual
| exploration and self-learning, amazing! But for entry into a new
| profession, or serious career advancement? Not nearly as good as
| "traditional" schools.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The value of the local college decreases dramatically if your
| goal isn't to stay local. If you want to move across the
| country, I'm would bet the MIT name outweighs the friend-of-a-
| friend introductions you could get.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| I have also completed a degree online and another in-person.
| It's a different experience but I strongly disagree that the
| online one is not as good for starting a new career (in my case
| it led to a prestigious PhD program and it was not an unusual
| outcome among my peers, definitely not an exception). I suspect
| many people's impression of online degrees is coloured by the
| fact that a lot of online programmes are opportunistic money
| making schemes of poor quality, but that is not an intrinsic
| property of this mode of learning.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| The courses are individually available on edX. You can audit them
| but the access is for a short period of time. I am hoping to
| finish Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance this time
| before my access expires.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Going to get a job with this course?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| It is more like a hobby/personal development kind of thing.
| The methods used in the course (stochastic models,
| multivariate optimization etc) are also applicable in many
| areas other than finance.
| gumby wrote:
| Are you asking if the experience resulted in useful knowledge
| that will help with performing a new job, or if they will use
| the "name" to get a foot in the door?
|
| Personally if I look at someone's education on a resume I
| simply ignore anything that's not a "regular" multi-year
| degree. That includes those year long executive MBAs which
| probably are useful for someone working for a big company.
|
| But if someone has had a couple of years in the workforce I
| don't even look at their education at all.
| moron4hire wrote:
| In my own hiring decisions, I also don't pay _that_ much
| attention to education. But I don 't have the last say, and
| unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that basically
| all but require an advanced degree to be able to progress
| in your career track past the 10 year mark.
|
| Small businesses and startups may not have as much HR
| mechanization to get in the way, but unless you have an in
| through networking, such places can be very hard to find,
| especially if you are looking for a place that is at all
| stable or paying a competitive salary.
|
| I have 20 years of experience in software development, with
| the last 10 having various degrees of management
| responsibility as I've been "the most responsible adult in
| the room" for a bunch of small companies. My last job ended
| when the company lost funding for my position. Now, at my
| 2k+ people current employer, I've already been
| administratively shoehorned into my current position
| (managing a development team), responsible for level X but
| titled at level (X-1) because I don't have a master's. My
| level is higher than most other people in my group, but the
| actual job I'm doing is a level higher, which would come
| with a very, very significant pay increase, because it's
| breaching the barrier of being primarily and individual
| contributor to being primarily a manager.
|
| My boss has said that my promotion track is basically
| frozen until I get one. The company will help pay for one,
| and there are a lot of people in my group that have taken
| advantage of the benefit, so it's not bullshit. But I
| really don't feel like I'd be doing it to learn anything,
| it'd just be for credentialing.
|
| Back when I first started my career, the only people I knew
| who had master's degrees were working in honest to goodness
| scientific research, or C-suite executives. We had ICs that
| didn't have CS degrees at all. Those days are clearly over.
| gumby wrote:
| > My boss has said that my promotion track is basically
| frozen until I get [a master's]. The company will help
| pay for one, and there are a lot of people in my group
| that have taken advantage of the benefit, so it's not
| bullshit. But I really don't feel like I'd be doing it to
| learn anything, it'd just be for credentialing.
|
| Interesting, would an online degree count? I was
| asserting "online credential -- meh" and you'd be a good
| example that I am wrong.
|
| Also, are you in Europe? I haven't seen this kind of
| thing in the US since the 80s, but then again, who really
| gets exposure to _lots_ of jobs?
|
| Thanks for your comment.
| skzv wrote:
| Great class, I did that one last winter. Challenging but
| rewarding.
| gumby wrote:
| The intellectual value of an MIT degree is only partially the
| classes themselves -- it's the whole experience, including who
| you meet, how you learn to think and the stuff you do.
|
| It's hard for me to appreciate the value of the MIT brand as a
| graduate. This feels like a small dilution of that brand, but so
| what?
|
| I wonder what the Institute's objective is. Education is such a
| minescule part of what MIT does that perhaps it's just an
| experiment in democratization of the MIT curriculum that someone
| wanted to try, and nobody else cared enough to say no?
| nadermx wrote:
| I feel the prestige MIT has comes from somewhere, probably
| engineering prowess and the genius of hacker culture. But in
| terms of how to think, I'd say any engineering/stem degree from
| any university touched on that as you see the dividend of that
| years later.
| gumby wrote:
| Their reputation comes from the high volume of high quality
| and influential research that they do, as well as their deep
| integration with other institutions (e.g. when I was doing
| the Aero Astro sequence as an undergrad the head left to
| become head of the US Air Force; instead we had the former
| head of NASA. Or maybe it was the other way around).
|
| When you look at the rankings of world universities the
| judgement is mostly by research output, not quality of
| education (though I think an MIT education is great, for the
| right students).
|
| MIT is a large research organization with a small school
| attached: tuition revenue is less than 10% of MIT's total
| revenue and education is about 15% of expenses though the web
| site mixes it in with other activity to make a larger number
| (you need the more detailed budget to dig the true number
| out).
| kjs3 wrote:
| _The intellectual value of an MIT degree is only partially the
| classes themselves -- it's the whole experience, including who
| you meet, how you learn to think and the stuff you do._
|
| I think that's true of many good schools; perhaps it's even the
| definition of a good school. It certainly was true of my own
| relatively well regarded engineering school. Who I met who
| influenced my future success, the opportunities I got access
| to, the way to approach learning new things, my preferences in
| extracurriculars, many more, all came from my time there.
| fires10 wrote:
| I have never understood this sentiment about the classes only
| being a small part. To me the classes were the only thing of
| value. Not once did I engage with any classmates outside of
| class on any academic subject. There was no scholarly learning
| or discussion. I did have those with professors during class or
| office hours. The availability tutors was beneficial. Most of
| the rest I felt was a distraction and a waste of time. There
| was no network to develop. I am not in contact with a single
| person I went to college with. It may work for some, but most
| of my colleagues say very similar things.
| gmadsen wrote:
| its not completely binary, but the comment was specific to
| MIT, which is known for having strong academic extra
| curriculars, which is instilled as a core value into all
| incoming classes of students. It matters and people care what
| you do outside of class at MIT.
|
| but even state schools, you get out of it, proportional to
| what you put in. I'm not sure your exact association with the
| word "value" , but even basics like resume building are
| directly impacted by clubs you are a part of. I know many
| that received job offers explicitly because of their
| involvement in a robotics F1 or nasa affiliated competition
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Boring. Wish there were something such as malware reverse
| engineering or other exotics system programming topics.
| ugh123 wrote:
| >Enroll in a program--no admission required--and take a series of
| graduate-level online courses, taught by MIT instructors, through
| edX or MITx Online.
|
| >Earn a program credential by completing the course and passing
| one or more proctored exams.
|
| Hah great. Just another way for people to game through online
| courses to attain a credential to be called an "MIT grad"
| codegeek wrote:
| And you bet this is going on those people's linkedin titles as
| "Ex MIT".
| bozhark wrote:
| "Former" a la Marines
| latenightcoding wrote:
| 100% I know a few, same with Harvard
| anticorporate wrote:
| MIT has been particularly egregious at slapping their name onto
| paid postgraduate programs. I get their ads constantly. Selling
| out the brand for short term profit isn't just for publicly
| traded companies anymore.
| bozhark wrote:
| It works though.
|
| I attended the very first MITx on electronics back in high
| school.
|
| It got me a job being on my resume
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Harvard does this too. I see a surprising number of people who
| put Harvard on their resume or LinkedIn only to find they did
| like a two week executive meetup there or something and were
| granted a credential of some sort from the institution.
| tptacek wrote:
| I mean, that's literally in the first sentence describing the
| product.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2015)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 2017: _MIT Deems MicroMasters a Success_
|
| https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/26/mit-deems-hal...
| bruceb wrote:
| The Micromasters for supply chain is $6500.
| https://micromasters.mit.edu/benefits/
|
| To get full masters https://scm.mit.edu/admissions/
|
| (Micromasters + 9 months on campus), it is approximately $50k
| Tuition, fees, books ONLY.
|
| Total estimated cost: $71-76K
|
| Full residential $84k Tuition, fees, books ONLY
|
| Total estimated cost: $129-140K
| Eridrus wrote:
| I want to live in a world where what you know and can do are the
| most important things that people get from education, but I think
| the sad reality is that a very large part of higher education is
| signaling.
|
| I weigh this in my mind against the fact that Andrew Ng's Machine
| Learning course that I did online in 2011 that was the single
| most valuable course I ever took, online or offline, and it
| totally changed the trajectory of my career. I did not seek a
| credential to put on my resume though because I viewed that as
| signaling the exact wrong thing.
| nightski wrote:
| Some of the micro-masters courses are extremely good as well,
| and I took them for free. You don't have to get the credential.
| ijidak wrote:
| Is Andrew Ng's course Coursera? Udemy? Something else?
| Eridrus wrote:
| I make no claims that the course is even still similar (I
| remember programming in Octave lol) or relevant, but it looks
| like it is on Coursera:
| https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-
| in...
| FredPret wrote:
| I remember the Octave course as well! It was pretty cool,
| you could submit and get a grade right from Octave.
|
| The pain of working with Octave arrays in that course
| pushed me to learn Python.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _MIT MicroMasters Program_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13127094 - Dec 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _MIT 's free online classes can now lead to MicroMaster's
| degree_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409044 - Oct
| 2015 (72 comments)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-01-15 23:01 UTC)