One market I haven't seen people discuss regarding this is businesses doing a large amount of research. I actually believe Coursera/Udacity/etc are actually trying to disrupt the undergrad education market, however I think we might start to see more businesses take advantage of this. With MIT for example, anyone could take any course without being a student, but the cost was at least double what a normal student would pay. Who would do this? Cambridge companies that need their staff caught up to speed on nlp, ml or something else. I'm fairly sure that Stanford has a similar deal.
For companies doing research that want to send their staff to these programs the main benefit is they want their researchers to have a top notch education in the area, but the cons are that the courses are very expensive and you have to have your employee off campus for however many hours a week the class is. Now it's possible pay nothing, have your staff stay in the office, and still be taught by world class experts.
I'm sure Google has a reasonable number of employees that are great programmers but could probably benefit from some formal CS background. Now they can keep these people on campus, and give them access to great materials for free (and even if there is a cost for these eventually it will be much lower), and get them training by world-class experts.
In this scenario a certificate is all you really need since the employer can say "I at least know you put some actual effort into this". Many companies don't necessarily need more employees with CS masters, but would certainly like more people with a foundation in nlp or ml. The structure of these courses essentially allows research companies the option to create an 'in-house' degree, covering only the material they find competitively beneficial.
For companies doing research that want to send their staff to these programs the main benefit is they want their researchers to have a top notch education in the area, but the cons are that the courses are very expensive and you have to have your employee off campus for however many hours a week the class is. Now it's possible pay nothing, have your staff stay in the office, and still be taught by world class experts.
I'm sure Google has a reasonable number of employees that are great programmers but could probably benefit from some formal CS background. Now they can keep these people on campus, and give them access to great materials for free (and even if there is a cost for these eventually it will be much lower), and get them training by world-class experts.
In this scenario a certificate is all you really need since the employer can say "I at least know you put some actual effort into this". Many companies don't necessarily need more employees with CS masters, but would certainly like more people with a foundation in nlp or ml. The structure of these courses essentially allows research companies the option to create an 'in-house' degree, covering only the material they find competitively beneficial.