BY BOB ADELMANN, New American
The impact of that credential from MIT will be huge. Richard DeMillo at Georgia Institute of Technology, said this is “a very big deal because the traditional higher education reaction to online programs [in the past] was, yeah, but it’s not a credential. So I think MIT’s offering a credential [is] quite a splash. If I were still in industry and someone came in with an MITx credential, I’d take it.” The Times noted that MIT would open its MITx software platform to any other university around the world to offer their own courses online for free. And that is going to change the entire paradigm of higher education. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey saw immediately the threat the MITx program presents to its peers: Most world-famous universities got that way through a process of exclusion. Their degrees are coveted and valuable precisely because they’re expensive and hard to acquire. If an Ivy League university starts giving degrees away for free, why would anyone clamor to be admitted to any Ivy League university?
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