> From your comments and the article, seems like the WGU model could completely disrupt the normal 4 year university experience, for self motivated learners.
I don't agree at all. The "normal" university experience is designed around the assumption that the student is not familiar with the subject, and thus they specify a path comprised of a combination of lessons and assignments that allows everyone to get up to speed on a topic and share a common base level of all the fundamentals at a given stage.
The OP's comments mention nothing of the sort. They show that, even though the student lacked some fundamentals, the preliminary work already had covered most of the topics.
Thus OP's story is one mostly about getting a certification instead of actually learning something new. It involves learning stuff at their own pace instead of being forced to ramp um on a time budget with hard constraints on where the acceptable speed of growth must be.
We should not confuse the two, and we should certainly not mistake being able to pass a certification as a reflexion of intelligence or capability. The challenge of getting from cluelessness to have a solid command of the fundamentals of a topic in less than 4 months is incomparably higher than just casually cruising on a topic for 10 years.
I don't agree at all. The "normal" university experience is designed around the assumption that the student is not familiar with the subject, and thus they specify a path comprised of a combination of lessons and assignments that allows everyone to get up to speed on a topic and share a common base level of all the fundamentals at a given stage.
The OP's comments mention nothing of the sort. They show that, even though the student lacked some fundamentals, the preliminary work already had covered most of the topics.
Thus OP's story is one mostly about getting a certification instead of actually learning something new. It involves learning stuff at their own pace instead of being forced to ramp um on a time budget with hard constraints on where the acceptable speed of growth must be.
We should not confuse the two, and we should certainly not mistake being able to pass a certification as a reflexion of intelligence or capability. The challenge of getting from cluelessness to have a solid command of the fundamentals of a topic in less than 4 months is incomparably higher than just casually cruising on a topic for 10 years.