2,400 MOOCs Starting in April (opens in new tab)

I work as an external examiner for CS students in Denmark, and I’ve seen nothing here that rivals the automated grading systems applied by Harvard and MIT on places like EDX. Harvard even build an entirely cloud based IDE to get students easy access to development environment from a browser during introduction courses.

I took a few of those courses to see what they are like, and the truth is, the MIT intro courses to computation are actually a lot better than the CS intro courses I took at Aalborg University two decades ago. Sure it’s been two decades, and I didn’t need to learn anything for the first time. The course content was roughly the same as it was back then though, it’s just explained so much better by the MIT lecturers and their automattic finger exercises.

Right now that’s not a threat to universities who aren’t doing this, because a degree is worth something and a few certificates are worth very little. But if that changes, then I see trouble on the horizon for universities that didn’t prepare for a world where they might have to compete online. On top of that, there is incentive for the individual professors, in at least one of the courses I went through, the accompanying book was authored by the professor who taught the course.

I guess there is a high probability that things won’t change of course. Too many MOOC are extremely poor quality, some sites like Udemy even consists entirely of amateurs, and it’s too easy to cheat. But if things do move toward universities teaching online, then we wouldn’t really need thousands of places to teach introduction to CS, would we?

I don't understand why anyone would expect otherwise? This is as close to the university experience as it can get.

It's the same list, but more comprehensive.