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A Free, High Quality On-Line University?
Lawrence Brown writes: "Michael Saylor, CEO of
MicroStrategy, has
donated $100 million towards creation of an on-line university which he says will offer an 'Ivy-League quality' education to anyone for free." Same idea as the Cooper Union. Okay, that's one billionaire putting his money to good use. What about the rest?
but I'll just put it here.
There's an article in the Washington Post about Marc Ewing (of RedHat fame), his wife, and the billion dollars they're now challenged with giving away.
It's a very interesting read in any case, but especially because of the financial success so many in the Free software community have been enjoying.
The only cheat-proof parts of regular university courses are the tests, everything else, with the exception of lab classes, is done outside of class.
A professor teaching a small class has a better chance of catching a plagarized essay by noting a similarity between two papers, but as long as the essays are all unique, how are they to tell what work the students did on their own?
And tests could be handled by hiring an independant agency to administer the tests somewhere local to the student. This wouldn't be free, but even with paying an examiner to watch a bunch of students, it's far cheaper than having to have a "bricks and mortar" school that everyone must attend. This isn't even much less secure, because most university tests I've seen have been administered by TAs, not the professor.
I think this could be almost, if not as secure, as the measures taken by a physical university, without costing much.
Most of you are probably still in college, so don't have the perspective to see it. Right now you want a piece of paper so you can get your job so you can succeed. However, that probably means that you don't have the time in school to play around with delving into a certain field of history or philosophy, maybe even because of the risk that it would bring your GPA down. 5 years from now, when you decide you really wish you knew something about a certain subject, you can log onto this Online University, and broaden your mind. Maybe you won't get anywhere with the piece of paper, maybe you won't even get a piece of paper, but you will be a better, more rounded person, and that is worth a lot more
You beat me to one of the issues: books. He referred to Andrew Carnegie and libraries in the original article. A university is going to need textbooks for classes and a library. While it is all well and good to say that lecturers will do it for recognition and posterity, there is no way to stock a library with an up-to-date, complete collection of relevant material for free. Some items can be obtained that way. An online university could mirror Project Gutenberg. I also heard yesterday that the Oxford English Dictionary is going online and that they are looking for institutions (such as libraries) to subscribe and then provide access to communities. He could make them an offer to pay to put them online for everyone.
Then there is the issue of up-to-date technical references and textbooks. There are going to be people willing to write material for free for a good cause. But making it complete, getting it reviewed for technical accuracy and keeping it up-to-date are a different issue. A good start might be to seek out good material that is already on the net on various subjects and offer the authors a permanent, stable home for it. That alone, with a really good index and search engine could be a fantastic asset.
Another idea that might attract some good free material would be to offer a service like Source Forge to people interested in creating free content. Give them free web space, backups, CVS trees, mailing lists, etc. for the project. Host mirrors for some of the open text formatting tools: (La)TeX, texinfo, DocBook, etc. and encourage authors to use one of them and link to the mirror so that users can download the software they need easily.
And, I second the motion to interview him. Maybe we can help him set the initial direction on some of this by asking some good questions. Whether his free online university succeeds or fails in the end, it is worth the effort. It will help answer the questions about what an online school can offer and what it needs to do to offer it.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Getting a degree requires that a person commit a lot of their time to it. Sure, the actual university fees may be free, but the actual cost to a person is a lot more than that.
In order to have a decent crack at the higher education whip, a person would have to:
The real route to free university education is for government to pay course fees, and provide a grant system, such as the one that's just about be clubbed to death in the UK. Yes, it means an increase in taxation in the short run, but once a generation of well educated graduates are unleashed on the nation, the increase in earnings that their degrees will bring will result in more tax going to the treasury.
Yes, I know this is a slightly simplistic look at it, but sometimes you have to look at things simply to understand rather complex issues.
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
In all reality, however, It's most probable that little will come of this. A university that is available entirely online is of little worth. Most colleges across the nation are starting online classes as we speak, so they fill the void already that an online university could hope for. I don't know about you, but I'll be happy with my paper degree, handed to me by a living dean, and the knowledge that I gained from real professors (and maybe a Teaching Assistant here and there). We don't need to focus on building new universities. Just make the ones that are already there better!
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
I think that people who believe in learning social interaction as a priority at college (opposed to the actual studies) are, by and large, Liberal Arts majors if you ask me. (Not intended as a troll, just an opinion).
Okay, as someone you finished their degree in Theoretical Physics a couple of years ago I'll reply :) I don't think anyone here really thinks the most important thing about college is learning social interaction, of course the primary object is to learn your subject.
But the point is that there are a lot of other aspects of college which are important to the rest of your life. Learning to meet and get on with new people, how to talk to people confidently and act in groups, how to work as part of a team in projects, how to live life on your own and a million other little things which prepare people for the rest of their life. The entire college experiance contributes to these things, yes even "snorting beers and shots of whiskey" as you say. Granted you can learn all these things by staying at home and doing a remote course, but the impetus from being in a totally new place and situation is lost, and people won't gain all these new skills, making it harder for them when they finally leave home and get a job.
There are two very different issues to consider here: The education is entirely online, and entirely free... Coupled together, these two will present some unique problems as well, but let's start step by step.
Online education is full of problems. A certain level of interaction between the instructor and the student is required for teaching. Note, 'teaching' and not 'learning'. Most of us here are self-taught to a good extent, and much of our learning has been online - but not in a structured manner.
A teacher needs the visual feedback of eye contact and voice in order to know if a student 'gets it' or not. Online tends to strip that away, just as it strips away obvious sarcasm in email. Some of the most valuable things I've learned at the big U, were tangential "Oh BTW" things that were not part of the program. That spontaneity and pesonification of the material is crucial to the experience of 'being taught'.
Online collaborative technologies are not yet ready. We're limited in bandwidth, standards, and understanding. It's very hard to deliver an audio lecture, with gif slides, to people with MODEMS. Collaborative tools are emerging, but half the time drop dead at a firewall. Downloadable lesson packages might as well be shipped on CD, and the problem reduces to non-collaborative self-study...
I'm currently taking an online graduate level course, and I'm finding it very frustrating. The specialized software required for the course is Win32-biased, and has required me to compromise an otherwise stable WinNT system to accomodate it. MS has it's hooks so deeply in this stuff that it's damn near impossible to do without a dedicated computer. Overcoming the technical challenges of the experiment is so time consuming for both the teachers and the students, that the content is almost an afterthought. Maybe this is a job for a dedicated internet appliance? It's clear that a standard framework for online learning is needed. But before one can be defined and implemented, a lot of experimentation (like my course and this proposed online university maybe) is needed to see what's actually still missiong.
There is a certain need for human contact when teaching/learning. Groups of students can collaborate online in working on a project, but presenting information in an interactive way is still far off. Teaching online, synchronously, is currently analogous to herding cats. The tools are not there. The mindset is not there. The whole concept of 'teaching' will have to be revised, because todays teachers are still trying to lecture - to a webcam...
The idea of academic integrity is unenforcable online. When I was an undergrad, we were carded when taking a final exam. We literally had to show a school ID, or a driver's license, to be let into the exam hall. Much like when taking the SAT. Online, your buddy - the office guru - can take the test for you, and you get the certificate/diploma. The entire office can be consulted, or books, or friends via email... Forget timed exams.... "Sorry. BSOD! What are you gonna do? Fail me? Microsoft ate my homework!"
Enough about that... On to free education:
The fact that anyone CAN get the education will mean that the degree will be worthless. This may be a very Good Thing, since if anyone can now get a piece of paper claiming competency, then they will have to PROVE it. Good Thing indeed. I just wish there was a way for all those Weekend MBA grads that dictate technical decisions to prove their ability to do something other than run Excel.
Free education is great, and the online distribution of it is the cheapest way to keep it free. Giving people the opportunity to learn, online, is wonderful, and beneficial to all. People with the desire to learn, and ANY available time (not 9 to 5 anymore) can improve their lot in life, and the lazy scumm can't just BUY a career. Merit and knowledge will become the metric of an educated person, not the name on the seal on the parchment.
But here's the rub. Free online education - good idea; synchronous teacher-students interaction - not there yet. Free online education is nothing more than another portal in this context. It's online self-study, via a place calling itself a 'college' or 'university' which is just an organized set of links to self-paced, self-study materials. I don't see this as much different than C++ in 21 Days.
The Institution of Education is a good thing as well. Creating an environment where more than facts are taught, but modes of thinking are created, is needed. A VR_U will have to resolve the technical problems of online collaborative teaching, and create the experience of learning, where it's not just about facts. Otherwise, we're already there, except a bit more distributed.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Anyone know how they plan to handle cheating on online universities?
A major part of the reputation most ivy league school is their strong honor code policies as well as massive anti-cheating stance. How can an online university promise to be as hard on cheating as M.I.T. or Harvard when it conceivably is so easy to cheat?
This is not a troll but a genuine question...I really am interested about how they plan to guarantee this, after all I've seen a certain degree of cheating in current college environments and the idea of taking all of one's test online seems to give such tests less legitimacy than does taken in class with exam supervisors watching over students like hawks.
Anyway, one thing I have found is that online education, at least the way CNU does it, totally shifts the responsibility of education from the teacher to the student. That is, it is not their responsibility to teach me, it is my responsibility to learn. If I don't understand, I need to go to the professor -- because he will not, can not, come to me.
In essence, it is a process of discovery whereby I explore original writings in various subjects, and then discuss them (via a webboard thingy) with my classmates, then the professor grades based on how well I seem to have gotten it.
I'm sure it works different for non-phil & religious studies classes -- but for these subjects, that's how they do it. All in all, it seems to work pretty well, at least if you're motivated. It forces students to learnd & think about the actual material, instead of this "what's going to be on the test" idiocy. OTOH, it's quite a bit more time consuming than a traditional class, at least for me.
To me, this sounds like a great idea. Guys, like it or not, there are people who can't afford to go to college and are unwilling to mortgage the rest of their lives for a mediocre education. If this can be made to work, it will be a tremendous opportunity for people who know how to learn on their own. Can anyone say: geeks?
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Any Ivy league education? I havn't read the article, but from that alone I have a problem. Now, lets just say a good education, because who cares about whether or not its actually Ivy, and IMHO, the coolest schools are not.
Now, as I'm sure a huge chunk of slashdot readers are college students, or at least were, you all know that there is WAY more to school that what you could get off a web page. In perticular, the people around you. I have learned more from them then I have from classes, just about.
And what about research? You can't really conduct research that requires any sort of lab online.
I think this idea is missing the point of school, you're learning life skills as well as job skills.