And go to study at Harvard?

In January-April of this year, I tried myself on the CS50x course at Harvard University at edx.org. To say that I liked it is not to say anything. It was unreal cool. In my opinion, computer science spherical training in a vacuum should be just that. By the way, I didn’t receive a certificate - I initially started up too late and didn’t fit into the deadline - literally a week was not enough. Sad but true.

But it was a good experience, and I decided to find out what else Harvard offers in the field of online learning, and this is what I found:


Harvard, in essence, is a collection of schools (Schools) —the equivalent of faculties. The most famous of schools in the “ordinary” world is probably Harvard Business School, and in Computer Science, of course, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is more famous, where Denis Ritchie, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, "man-month" Brooks and many more . All computer science is taught in this particular school, and the CS50x mentioned above is also, naturally, from there.

Americans would not be Americans if they did not give an opportunity (for money) to study at Harvard for those who really, really want this, but they just can’t just go to Massachusetts for a couple of years. For this purpose, the Harvard Extension School was created - this is a separate school, which contains the most popular areas of study from other Harvard schools - there is management, finance, literature, and Computer Science (more here ). True, whatever one may say, if you decide to get a master’s or bachelor’s degree at Extension School, you still have to go to Boston in the summer and take several courses on campus, with live lecturers and live audiences. Dough must nemeryannom, yes.
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But, to the delight of rogue women, at Extension School there is still such a thing as degree-certificates - including the certificate of interest to me in Software Engineering . The certificate is given for the successful completion of five graduate courses (that is, courses that can later be credited with a Master’s / Bachelor’s degree at Harvard), according to the formula 2 + 1 + 2, i.e. 2 required + 1 out of 2 to choose from + 2 out of 6 to choose from (one of the required courses is the same CS50, fully available on Edx). First introductory lectures are freely provided for all these courses. I looked at them all, and I really liked it - at least, they differ for the better from everything I read in my alma mothers. For example, the second required course is CS51 “Abstraction and Design in Computation”, dedicated to functional programming and Ocaml language - this is a field of knowledge that has bypassed me, and judging by the introductory lecture, this topic is explained very interesting and accessible (good oratory of lecturers This is a separate topic for conversation).
In general, having seen all the introductory lectures on all the courses offered, which are offered to choose from, I understood - “we must take it!”. No, well, really, I was taught in my universities disgustingly (and do not tell me that I did not study in those places), but here what I like is enough theory and a lot of hands-on practice.

There are only a couple of worthwhile “but” discussions:
1) It is quite expensive - the entire course will cost 10K dollars, which is very noticeable for the budget of a young specialist.
2) You need to study well, it's a must - grades for all courses must be at least B (i.e. not less than 80%).
2) The dividends from this investment are not clear - knowledge in my head will add, this is probably a fact. Will the certificate play some value when searching for a new job? Would five courses delight the tmilid? Will h-ara be excited? Questions, questions ...

What do you think, Habr?