Forbes this morning touted MIT as game changer by brining most of their content online available for anyone who is interested. Folks completing courses online would get a certificate which won’t have weight as that of MIT diploma you get when you attend the class in person.
This could trigger a question on many curious minds “Why do I need to go to real college then ?“. A question, I have been pondering for a while in a different format “What is the value add of a college/school in the era where you have almost everything available on web, free or paid ?”
Answer is “World works on relationships and there are no better alternatives to learn, experience and make them work for you, than going to meet and interact with real people”. You can learn whatever you want over internet, but most important things you need to be able to successful in your professional and personal lives is your Human Skills. This is true even in the digital age, where we have luxury to send a tweet to president or Skype with someone across the ocean. At the end of the day, normal human being, use these tools to influence his social circle.
Even if MIT had announced that, their online certificate is of same value as that of their real classroom diploma ( they won’t, as it doesn’t make sense from business point of view), folks who would attend their original classroom would turn out to be much more successful than those who just took same classes just online.
Why is it that a person graduating from Harvard or MIT gets much more success than a person who is much more brilliant but just could not attend one of these well known college? Its all about network and things you learn when you deal with real human being. That is what you need when you enter into a real world. No doubt that you need to be smart, but I have seen much smarter people who could not make it because (a) they don’t know right people or people who would know right people or (b) they don’t have human skills to make it work for themselves.
Opening up courses online would democratize education, and many education institutes would need to redefine the way they currently impart education. There is and will be, much better course content, explanation available online and education provider would need to focus on other side of the success equation, i.e. impart more of Human Skills.
Focus on Human skills, real world exposure in a controlled environment and strong alumni network is what is going to make a college successful than others across the street.
Overall, I welcome this move from MIT and encourage students to think about the value a brick and mortar college can impart in their lives.
