What are the future prospects of biotechnology students?

What do graduate students think will be the effect of MOOCs on the future of online education?

• At an online education forum recently held at Yale, one graduate student wondered whether MOOC's would eventually limit job opportunities in academia. Another said that her brief scanning of the job postings listed on the Chronicle of Higher Education website showed that half of them looked for online learning experience. Clearly, this has the potential to affect graduate students' employment prospects. I'd be especially curious to hear the thoughts of grad students who have TA'ed MOOC's.

• Answer:

  Awesome. I am from CS and I can only talk about mostly AI subjects that I have taken, although not finished one yet. MOOCs have a low rate of finishing(apparently),  but concrete steps have been taken to make more interaction possible. If your intentions are right, you want to learn and work through the best material out there, MOOCs are amazing. I have recently been working through Stat 110, which is not a part of Coursera/Udacity, but has all the lectures on youtube. And finally able to understand a lot more about probability ! Thanks Prof . Without the MOOC concept, I would have never known about "pebble world" and "prosecutor's fallacy". In fact, I was (trying to) recently explain(ing) a sensational murder case back home in India in terms of the latter ! MOOCs are amazing for driving forward the sharing of knowledge. If you are asking more about the place of university education when you can get all that content for free, well, universities are not just about the classes right ? Its about the set of people you work with and your growth as a person. MOOCs do not fill that gap. They fill the knowledge gap. Not the experiences gap. They were never meant to.