Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree - New certificate program takes only six months to complete, and will be a fraction of the cost of college but will it carry a similar weight?

I always worry when I see a rush to get a piece of paper and then think one just jumps into a successful career firing on all cylinders. The same goes for college degrees themselves actually as I studied for a degree but most of what I really learnt, was from teaching myself, working through the night on a problem, and applying my skills to obtain a very broad contextual view of what I was working on. Not easy things to prove on a piece of paper…

But I get the educational system does need a big shake-up with regard to its relevancy to careers (how and what is learnt) as well as the cost (the way its done may be costly). Then there’s also proprietary textbooks authored by lecturers which are compulsory to their courses… lot’s to fix! So yes maybe Google (and others like IBM, Red Hat, etc) can make contributions here as they are also major employers and services in their own right.

Learning technology is technically very easy and cheap – a Raspberry Pi, YouTube, free software, ebooks, and online groups but again there is no piece of paper to prove the completion of anything