7 ms·

What happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT classes

47 points by capex 13y ago

e3pi 13y 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 13y ago
  Wyden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden
  - e3pi 13y ago
    Thank you. I still had time to edit correction.
ommunist 13y ago
It may end up with Al-Quran classes in Massachusets.
- daliusd 13y 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.
rowanseymour 13y 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?
- ulrikrasmussen 13y 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?
  - rowanseymour 13y 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/ http://cloudmeetscampus.com/
    - ulrikrasmussen 13y ago
      That sounds interesting. From the home page, it even seems that the program offers housing with other students, giving them a good study environment. The tuition seems to be around $1000-$1500 - I don't know what the average income is in Rwanda, but I assume that this is manageable for most people?
angersock 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_Arms_Industry
dschiptsov 13y 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.
- WalterGR 13y 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 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,PL6879A8466C44A5D5 http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - dschiptsov 13y ago
    Yeah, this is the best version available, while he is still using classic text terminal. So classy.))
    - WalterGR 13y ago
      > So classy. CS61A is one of the best courses I took in college and Brian Harvey was one of the best lecturers I had. So whatever he uses, I'd say it works.
      - dschiptsov 13y ago
        "All you need is Lambda".))
xerophtye 13y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arfa_Karim
- Tloewald 13y 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 13y 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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
6d0debc071 13y 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.
- gngeal 13y 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.
  - 6d0debc071 13y 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?
    - gngeal 13y ago
      Not necessarily "forced", but I was certainly much uncomfortable. A brick and mortar type of school is good if you need access to equipment and labs, but fortunately, my interests don't include practical nuclear engineering or brain surgery.
- Tloewald 13y 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.
coldtea 13y 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.
- Tloewald 13y 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 13y 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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
Stwerner 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 ...

47 points by capex 13y ago

e3pi 13y 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 13y ago
Wyden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden
- e3pi 13y ago
  Thank you. I still had time to edit correction.

ommunist 13y ago

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

daliusd 13y 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.

rowanseymour 13y 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?

ulrikrasmussen 13y 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?
- rowanseymour 13y 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/ http://cloudmeetscampus.com/
  - ulrikrasmussen 13y ago
    That sounds interesting. From the home page, it even seems that the program offers housing with other students, giving them a good study environment. The tuition seems to be around $1000-$1500 - I don't know what the average income is in Rwanda, but I assume that this is manageable for most people?

angersock 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_Arms_Industry

dschiptsov 13y 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.

WalterGR 13y 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 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,PL6879A8466C44A5D5 http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,d,Computer_Science,PL...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  Yeah, this is the best version available, while he is still using classic text terminal. So classy.))
  - WalterGR 13y ago
    > So classy. CS61A is one of the best courses I took in college and Brian Harvey was one of the best lecturers I had. So whatever he uses, I'd say it works.
    - dschiptsov 13y ago
      "All you need is Lambda".))

xerophtye 13y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arfa_Karim

Tloewald 13y 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 13y 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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

6d0debc071 13y 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.

gngeal 13y 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.
- 6d0debc071 13y 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?
  - gngeal 13y ago
    Not necessarily "forced", but I was certainly much uncomfortable. A brick and mortar type of school is good if you need access to equipment and labs, but fortunately, my interests don't include practical nuclear engineering or brain surgery.
Tloewald 13y 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.

coldtea 13y 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.

Tloewald 13y 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 13y 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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

Stwerner 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 ...