> "so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé"
Well this is not a general solution, but for Coursera's Probabilistic Graphical Models, I remember someone in the course discussion board said that this was such a demanding course that he would hire anybody, who passed the course with good points, to his company.
"so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé"
I think most wise recruiters will look for evidence of being smart, of getting stuff done, and of being a good fit.
Unless you're in research, serious jobs are project based, not learning based.
If you spend three years learning all you can about CS and making an Awesome Cool Thing, I don't think many employers are going to think 'Meh.'
The situation in the UK is that degrees are getting more and more expensive and less and less valuable. It's making more sense now to go straight into work, even at intern level, than to lose three years and rack up tens of thousands in debt for no obvious benefit.
<i>If</i> the teaching and learning were truly worth the cash, it would be no contest. But outside the Big Name universities, they really aren't. And even there, a big part of the benefit comes the networking opportunities.
In middle league universities you don't get the networking, or the teaching, or the experience, or the industry connections. So what are you paying for?
It would be fun if the general solution was making online classes absurdly hard. Unfortunately, it's hard enough to stop cheating on exams in physical lecture halls, so once a high grade guarantees students job interviews....
Companies already can choose to interview anyone who's taken relevant coursework, but usually can't commit that much time so they screen applicants first. If the grades in a few particular online courses become widely known for getting students interviews, I think most of us would expect cheating in those classes to rise and the classes' role as a screening mechanism would degrade.
I don't have data on cheating available, but anecdotally, I've TAed economics classes at UCSD where---routinely---over 100 students in a class would turn in word-for-word identical homework (this had nothing to do with whether students were allowed or prohibited from "working in groups" on homework, so it was definitely considered cheating in some of the classes). I suspect that cheating varies a lot from university to university and from major to major.
Reliably measuring cheating is of course difficult; we can measure /detected/ cheating, we cannot measure /undetected/ cheating.
And who can blame students for cheating considering the incentives - I was never faced with the choice to cheat or fail, but you can bet if I'd gone $70,000 into debt for school I'd cheat before I'd fail.
I once sat in a computer lab and watched a group of four guys completing an online take-it-when-you-like multiple choice exam for first year mathematics for engineers. The software attempted to prevent copy-and-paste and changing windows to Google, and of course there were instructions saying the exam should be their work alone, and they shouldn't look up answers. One of the guys was on the exam system and would read the question; his three peers on computers next to him would google for and calculate answers. Needless to say, by the time the fourth guy was doing the exam his results had little to do with how much mathematics he had personally learned!
Well this is not a general solution, but for Coursera's Probabilistic Graphical Models, I remember someone in the course discussion board said that this was such a demanding course that he would hire anybody, who passed the course with good points, to his company.