OPINION: An Open Education Not Ready to be Open
Tensions between 'open' and traditional schooling
I am a tried-and-true supporter of open courseware. They enabled the first steps of my becoming a software engineer. So much of my knowledge today is indebted to people who have graciously shared theirs on the Internet. Even more of my belief in the possibility of a new path is indebted to this generous ethos of enabling access to worlds you did not previously know.
But anyone who has actually studied with online open courseware knows it is terribly lonely and difficult, even for very motivated learners. When I was taking Stanford’s online introductory computer science class in Taiwan, I had no access to people who could help me when I got stuck. The only thing that lessened this loneliness was the writing of a girl in San Francisco who had already completed one of the classes. When I absolutely needed some hints to progress, I consulted her blog for quick and limited hints. Often, it was for trivial but bottlenecking questions like how to incorporate certain libraries. To me, lifting her solutions wholesale (or “cheating”) had no value. If I didn’t do as much of it as possible myself, the knowledge was not mine.
When I started looking for jobs as a software engineer, I put up my completed assignments as part of my portfolio on GitHub to demonstrate that I had studied fundamental data structures. After all, I had invested close to 300 hours for the two introductory courses and I wanted to showcase this in lieu of a formal CS