The rash of pontificating on the impact of MOOCs on traditional higher education continues. Duke engineering school dean Tom Katsouleas envisions a world where we all learn from MOOCs but the richest among us pay for mentoring from the world's best and brightest.The New York Times recently published another article on courses offered by Udacity, Coursera, and EdX. And a new infographic cannily points out the benefits of online education over traditional classrooms.
While it's still uncertain how MOOCs will disrupt the higher education model, their rapid proliferation and adoption (remember, it was just last year that Sebastian Thrun offered the first one on AI) raise questions about the value of knowledge over credentials. MOOCs make it possible for people to gain skills that are marketable to companies looking for talented employees. But, will organizations be willing to take the risk of hiring someone without a degree, but who has demonstrated mastery of a skill by completing a MOOC?
Organizations are conservative beasts. They quite sensibly prefer known quantities over unknown ones. A degree from even the most obscure regionally accredited college comes with certain promises. By granting a degree, the college promises that the student had to meet certain minimal requirements, and had to learn research and critical thinking in an environment that assured some degree of academic integrity.
There are no such promises backing MOOCs. While anyone can vouch for the quality of an online course from Princeton, Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, there is no way to verify that MOOC students didn't cheat in order just to pass the class. There is also, at this point, little assurance of the quality of grading in some subjects (see the New York Times article), though this may change in the very near future.
So, will hiring managers be willing to take a risk on a candidate with a briefcase full of Coursera certificates but no degree? At this point, probably not. But I argue that they should be, because doing so might be a great way to help the U.S. economy get its groove back.
In Hackers, Stephen Levy details how a mangy group of MIT students became addicted to programming room-sized computers in the 1950s to 1970s. Few of them graduated with degrees, but most of them got jobs that allowed them to put their prodigious talents to use for leading corporations, universities, and the government. One of them even managed to get tenured as a professor at MIT without a degree. What is evident in the book is that this was made possible by the fact that a few brave souls were able to look past the lack of credentials to see their real talent. Recent history is replete with such examples, most notably Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
I hope that MOOCs allow a similar phenomenon. Instead of being limited to programmers, however, it could expand to talented people in all fields. An applicant may not have a degree in business, say, but maybe they've demonstrated their abilities in Coursera classes and have real-world experience running a small business. A talented instructional designer may learn her trade through MOOCs and prove it by designing free tutorials available on her own website. Organizations should be willing to take a chance on people like this, because too many people are cut off from access to higher education by exorbitant tuition and the demands of family, work, and life. Organizations will lose out if they don't harness the diverse talent spread throughout the population.
A flowering of talent in many spheres of human endeavor, fertilized by near universal access to education, could drive this country's economy just the way that the advances made in Cambridge and Silicon Valley have for the past 60 years. In the end, knowledge is worth more than a credential.
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