> The real Achilles heal is certification, for it to be valued employers need to be convinced you aren't cheating and that the assessment is rigorous.
I really don't think this is it either, because you have to be naive to think there isn't massive cheating that goes on in traditional universities. I would venture to guess that cheating is perhaps lower currently with the students who complete MOOC's because the fact that there is no current incentive to do so. Also it's not that it isn't rigorous either -- at least for some of the EdX courses they are almost 1:1 translations of the OpenCourseWare versions, which themselves are just the actual classes they teach at MIT.
I really don't think this is it either, because you have to be naive to think there isn't massive cheating that goes on in traditional universities. I would venture to guess that cheating is perhaps lower currently with the students who complete MOOC's because the fact that there is no current incentive to do so. Also it's not that it isn't rigorous either -- at least for some of the EdX courses they are almost 1:1 translations of the OpenCourseWare versions, which themselves are just the actual classes they teach at MIT.