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Bringing Convenience and Open Source Methods To Higher Education
Business Week has a piece discussing the effects internet-based technology and open sharing are having on the standards of higher education. The author says every product's success or failure depends on its fidelity — the overall quality of experience — and convenience. Since the internet has made the sharing of even expert-level knowledge convenient, he wonders how long it will be until some school or company raises the fidelity enough to have their degrees accepted alongside those of professional-grade colleges. Quoting:
"Once in a while, a market gets completely out of balance. Forces conspire to prevent either a high-fidelity or high-convenience player from emerging. All the offerings crowd around one end or the other. Eventually, someone nails a disruptive approach. Customers and competitors rush in and the marketplace wonders why that great idea didn't come sooner. The higher education market is a lot like that. For centuries the university model dominated because nothing else worked. No technology existed that might deliver an interactive, engaging educational experience without gathering students and teachers in the same physical space. ... These days broadband Internet, video games, social networks, and other developments could combine to create an online, inexpensive, super-convenient model for higher education. You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."
Small problem with that idea in the physical sciences, a simulated lab isn't much use for hands on experience.
Aren't traditional education facilities now using this technology as an add-on, as well as offering the more traditional face to face stuff?
I have completed a Masters degree from a university that has been around for many years, and has a decent reputation - I studied totally via distance education, I have never even been to the city where the campus is. My testamur looks the same as someone who studied locally/in person, it doesn't exactly have "completed via distance" stamped on it... sorry maybe I am missing the point, I don't see what the big deal here is, although I haven't RTFA (of course).
People will always look at the course provider, and existing education providers have access to the same technology, with the existing goodwill... that's close to "game over" for non-universities etc, although the rise of technical certs shows that non-Uni stuff on the resume can still count for something (if you're from HR anyway).
One potential problem:
How does the school prove the person who took whatever tests over the internet is the person they were said to be?
Another thing brick and mortar schools do is allow for some extremely basic filtering of students...students must be able to attend a classroom with other people, work collectively in some cases, and have some basic competition in general, without being too disruptive.
Otherwise, it's a no-brainer. Many brick and mortar schools now have some online component.
The University of Phoenix which is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, is partway there, though it's a hybrid of online and campus learning.
Um, "partway there"? If someone came to me with a University of Phoenix degree, I would reply, "Well, that DOES prove you like to pay a lot of money for toilet paper."
The University Of Phoenix education is a complete and utter joke. What they teach is worthless and best and counterproductive at worst(and yes, I have seen some of the content of their masters programs, assignments that include algebra I was doing in 7th grade and homework questions like, "What is a MAN?")
These articles don't want to point out the fact that entrepreneurs have already tried, and failed pretty miserably, at taking on the higher education market before, and other than using the internet, I don't see much difference between what was tried then and what this guy is proposing.
Monstar L
Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems (JAVA), met me for breakfast at an unassuming little restaurant in a strip mall tucked into the woods a few minutes' drive from his house.
Over an omelet and fruit, McNealy ....
While drinking my tea after having eaten my toast and having a bowel movement, I refrained from buying an airline ticket to fly to Business Week's office to slap the shit out of this "reporter" for adding "color" to his article.
Ooooh to be a journalism professor! This article could have been one page!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Is to further the transformation of professors from a collegial model supported by tenure and academic freedom to an underpaid, no-job-security "information transmission technician" temp job to facilitate the extraction of tuition from McStudents.
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Canada has at least two fully accredited distance learning universities and a bunch of the regular ones offer distance learning courses. Athabasca was founded sometime in the 70s or early 80s, I think, as an initiative by the provincial government to better provide education to remote areas. They used to use the mail extensively but switched to the Internet in the late 90s. The article seems to think this is somehow a new and revolutionary idea.
Correspondence is okay for part of an undergrad degree, and you can get away with it for all of one, but it's not so great for research-based advanced degrees.
We also have the "University" of Phoenix and DeVry. These are NOT the same thing.
As others have pointed out, this capability has already been embraced by higher education for certain coursework and certain students. It works well for professional certification activities, for instance, where mature students are pursuing specific aims. I took a graduate engineering course with full time students in the classroom and Raytheon engineers connecting via video from their own campus. Tests were remote, but lab exercises required they travel to the campus.
I have been responsible for remote observing capabilities at an astronomical observatory. Astronomers often take very large datasets using fancy cameras with numerous quirky controls. (The controls for the Hubble Space Telescope are at the Space Telescope Science Institute on Earth.) The technology for operating these remotely has been available for 20 years or more - especially given recent advances in network bandwidth. Except for certain niches, however, astronomers still choose to travel to remote mountaintops. There are the advantages of being physically present with the equipment and the staff - and there are also the logistical questions of NOT being present on your college campus and having to get up the following morning to teach your regular courseload.
Conferences are another similar situation. I've attended and been involved in organizing numerous conferences. The one next month is 14 timezones away. Hundreds of people will still make the trip because of the value of talking to people face-to-face, and especially the value of talking to many people simultaneously face-to-face. Video links are also terrible at providing lucky chances for unplanned conversations. I can't count the number of productive partnerships that have germinated over a stale lunch and a cold beer in between sessions.
Consider the Star Fleet Academy (or Hogwarts or the Isle of Roke). If ever there was a situation ripe for distance learning, that is it - and yet through several movies and TV series, book after book, the academy is depicted as a physical location shared by students from diverse planets - literally of every color... One might say that this is a failure of imagination of B-list sci-fi authors. It is perhaps more accurate to say that there is a requirement for a certain level of similar drama from the educational institutions that actually exist today.
The final point is that the business model demands that such distance learning evolves from the brick-and-mortar campuses, not from some entrepreneur with a limited vision. "Customers" (students and their parents) select colleges for many reasons. The expense and the awkwardness of travel are part of the positive factors involved in making the decision. For niche markets the customers will seek value based on brutal economic decisions. For most full-time undergrads, however, the adventure is the whole point. Not much adventure in a videogame education.
You can take The Open University in britain as an example of why I don't believe this is ever going to work. "The Open University is the distance learning university founded and funded by the UK Government." So, you would imagine a degree from here carries at least some weight in academics and business, but unfortunately that's not the case. Perhaps not so bad as the example of University of Phoenix above, as some professional bodies do accept their legitimacy, it is a sad fact that OU degrees are sneered upon in britain today. This is likely due to the high percentage of students who sit courses "for personal interest", i.e. for fun, instead of as part of their professional career. As such, I imagine the drop-out rate is rather high. So, a government sponsored university that has been established 40 years this year has not truly broken through to be considered 'legitimate' or perhaps 'competitive'; what hope can there be for an online university?
Did you not take any courses for "personal interest" when you were in college? Here in the US, they're called "electives".
But we're talking about degrees, aren't we? If you're going for a full degree online, most likely you're in it for more than personal interest. However, I know nothing of the quality of OU courses.
The friendships you form at college often last your entire life.
If you're working in an organization, and get a part time degree, it often does you no good.
You are much better off going full time to a college and making the contacts. Get an entry level job in your field when you graduate. Use the network you formed in university; your friends and the industry contacts supplied by your professors. (You do talk to your professors don't you?)
Graduate from an online degree mill and you're on your own.
You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."
Personally speaking, it is this sort of thing that I think is as much a part of University as the education itself. Generally speaking, campus grounds always have a great atmosphere, your Professors are usually decent people, and pretty much at no other time will you be able to drink and party so hard with so little consequence in your life. Cutting that out would IMO, be a big loss for young students.
"You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."
Personal contact with professors. Don't need that. I realize this is supposed to be provocative and snarky but --
He's suggesting a two-class society, in which some of us will be alphas and go on to first-class colleges, while the rest of us will be betas and memorize pages from the Internet.
When you go to college, you're in an educational environment 24/7, getting exposed to more ideas and experiences than most people get otherwise in a lifetime.
Can you imagine spending all your waking hours for 4 years on the Internet hooked up to the University of Phoenix?
To me, the classic moment of college was standing up in a classroom having to defend a position that people disagree with. And then arguing about it later in the cafeteria or dorm. If you've never spent all night arguing over the existence of God, then you never had an education.
Most of the important things I learned at college -- computers, biology, art, music, new sexual positions, fixing cars -- I learned bullshitting with my friends over at my house, or over somebody's dining room table, or just hanging out. And yes we did have a few drinks or a joint. And yes it's nice to have some girls join you in your intellectual explorations. It was also nice to have a library where books were arranged according to the LC call number so whatever you were interested in, you could find a whole shelf on the subject, and read whatever you wanted (even if it was under copyright). And it was nice to go over to the computer lab or physics lab and try to crash the system. And it was nice to run into my professor in the supermarket.
This model of an education is like a factory worker punching in a time clock and sitting on an assembly line for 8 hours. Talk about obsolete models.
University is more than a bunch of classes and tests. It's a life experience including: moving away from home and living on your own for the first time, meeting and getting along with people who are more talented than you (a shock if you aren't used to it), establishing friendships and the beginnings of a life-long network, finding out where professors come from, buying some Staedler instruments and spending hours admiring them (partly because you can't afford to do anything else after you paid for them with that month's food money), and discovering the university library.
I can't be the only one who's outlook on life was modified by spending time in a library like the Robarts. There's an atmosphere of concentrated truth in a place like that you just don't find anywhere else. First, you find out that the world is full of people who know a whole lot. Second, you learn that people have spent a lot of time writing down what they know. And the scale of what I'm talking about only really becomes clear when you stand in a library stack with books stretching off forever and ever, each one some person's passionate little gem.
To me, higher learning is about more than just getting some facts straight so you can get a job.
But having said all that, it will be true that other models of learning will bring education to people who otherwise wouldn't get it, and who can argue with that?
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
At one time I thought I'd leave my academic job and actually gather people to do this as a startup, but I'm too risk-averse. Still, the idea is sound and I hope someone steals it.
The idea is this: Release high-quality digital teaching modules under an open license, and pay for top talent to have them made. This teaching software would include video lectures integrated with an interactive "textbook" which is more than a simple reading. The textbook would include manipulable simulation applets to illustrate whatever concept is being discussed, say, the flow of electrons through the p/n junction of a transistor or the effect on supply-demand curves of the change in the velocity of money. The idea is to simulate, occasionally in a video-game-like setting, something like a lab component of a university course. In many ways, this would be "not as good" as an actual lab, but in some ways it would be even more fun. Since you can fire a BFG in a game but not in real life, I would like to let students operate simulated equipment like x-ray lasers, particle accelerators, space probe thrusters, etc. An AI, which would start off primitive and improve in later versions, would simulate as many elements as possible of how the world reacts to the student's input.
The video lectures would be designed by a prestigious group of the field's experts, and delivered by one or several of these. They would allow students many opportunities to interrupt and seek more detail on the concept discussed, either in text, audio or even a secondary "tutor" lecture. Video answers to frequently asked questions would be available in the release of the software, and many more would be seamlessly available, linked through online wikis. There would be a wiki and forum for each "chapter" of each textbook, where students can get help from each other and kind experts. The latter would not be paid, but certainly the programmers, designers, authors and lecturers would be. Where would the money for this come from?
First, we academics to do lots of stuff for free. I don't get a cent when I publish years of research in a journal article. We don't get paid for reviewing journal articles, even if the journal is for-profit. It's an honor to just contribute, and it's our employers (universities) that indirectly compensate us for these unpaid professional activities, through tenure, raises, etc. I can imagine that being selected as, say, one of the top experts to design a module on ancient philosophy would be considered a substantial career achievement. So much excellent work from academics can be gotten cheaply. Consider, for example, MIT's open courseware. Online help, in almost-real time could also be plausibly provided pro bono.
Still, many aspects of excellent digital teaching modules would cost real money. Since it's essential that this expensive content would be distributed freely and globally, any company that did this would have to be giving away their crown jewels. At first, I thought that grants from governments, universities and philanthropists might cover these costs, and they would still play a role, but the real business model would be based around testing. The idea is actually pretty simple. With a university's worth of free, outstanding educational material being available universally and for free, many students who work their way through a course might be interested in receiving a certification that they indeed know that material. This would be done much like the GRE - in a supervised classroom somewhere not far from their location, with ID verification and other cheating-prevention measures. The GRE costs about a hundred bucks to take, and this pays for all the associated costs. A certification one of the courses I imagine would cost more. I'm not sure what is the right price point. It would be less than the cost of a similar course in a junior college. Still, we might be in the range of $300+. Why would someone pay so much to take prove the know physical anthropology and inorganic chemistry? Actually, there are many re
Some earlier posters have touched on this, but a very major hurdle to Open Source higher education in the United States is accreditation by a regional accrediting body. These bodies are the ones that essentially say "your programs meet minimum standards" and having accreditation is what makes your degree able to transfer from one school to the next. There are already many private colleges (ITT Tech, Corinthian, Webster, etc), but they're not regionally accredited.
Regional accreditation is extremely important when it comes to transferability of college credit. Because all regional accreditors agree to fairly common standards for educational institutions (qualified faculty, etc), if I'm reviewing your transcript from an institution in California, and I'm an admissions officer in Massachusetts, I know that your education has met certain minimum standards.
Absent regional accreditation, I can't easily make that decision. I have to get syllabi for every course you've taken, along with the course catalog and evaluate each course manually to determine whether the content is equivalent.
Have a gander at The Kahn Academy. Free, expansive and excellent learning materials focused primarily on math and science (the areas America need most help in). Sal Kahn has a youtube channel set up here, with topics ranging from how to multiply to quantum physics. Each explained clearly and concisely (and obviously, broken into 10 minute lessons).
Since the internet has made the sharing of even expert-level knowledge convenient...
People in college today are paying roughly the same per semester in state school that I was paying to go to a private college a couple decades ago. And, just like the health insurance industry, the costs are rising much faster than the rate of inflation would justify.
Before long, he claimed, the whole bloated, expensive, lecture-based higher education system will face the first challenge to its very existence: open-source, online higher education that costs a fraction of four years at Harvard--but is good enough for employers who want a college graduate.
That's certainly true for some classes. I had classes that were simply too big to offer any meaningful interaction with the teacher, some with hundreds of students. Those could be replaced with online offerings. Some majors could be done entirely online, many could not.
Once you get up out of the basics it's harder to replace with an online offering. You can't do clinicals or labs online and in some medical professions your last year is basically all clinicals. But it's possible we could replace a lot of the fringe classes and departments universities keep because of tenure requirements. Particularly those that don't require labs. Yeah, yeah insert standard tenured professor defense here. The bottom line is we just can't afford to keep going like we are. Something has to give, tenure will be one of those things.
Maybe we move the required classes online. History, English, sociology, foreign language requirements and universities shrink to offering advanced specialty classes and hands-on labs.
Education has to change, just like health insurance has to change. The systems we have for both are dysfunctional and costing us well beyond what they should. We can't handicap systems to benefit a few while imposing suffering on millions. We have to try something different.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And it was nice to go over to the computer lab or physics lab and try to crash the system.
I did that in high school. When I succeeded in crashing the system I thought I would just restart it - no big deal. So I restart the computer and the computer came back up just fine, as I get ready to leave I notice the computer next to me is also down! Yes, every single computer in the lab room crashed (I had tried to access a system file on a Novell network by inserting an OLE file into a word document). Luckily, I was the only person in the lab so I proceeded to reboot the remaining 30 or so computers.
The next day I got called into the principals office and was told that I had crashed every computer in the school. I got one week of in school suspension ... could have been worse I suppose
Moral of the story: Use someone else's account when you're trying to crash a system ;)
The most important thing you lose in an on-line university is the research-teaching connection.
The thing that most people don't realize as students, is that there are many very attractive ideas that are simply wrong. They are as attractive to the professors as they are to the students (professors are people too). And, some fields (like Linguistics, where I have personal knowledge) it is a permanent struggle to avoid the easy, attractive theories. The real experimental data is often much more complex and messy than anyone wants to believe.
If you don't do research yourself, or don't have colleagues who are doing research, it's all too easy to believe whatever is easy to teach. Chomsky, for instance. While the guy deserves credit for starting the field, most of what he said has since been proven wrong (except where he was careful to hedge his statements). But, his theories live on because people want to believe them.
So, if you cut the teaching-research linkage, I fear that we will gradually lose most of our knowledge and settle into the comfortable routine of teaching a curriculum with all the rough edges smoothed away. Efficient, but (largely) wrong.
A number of comments have been made about the difficulties of doing lab work, etc. online. However, not all degrees are science degrees, and there are fertile fields for entrepreneurs in those areas. Many of the same arguments against online degrees have been levelled in the past against distance education, and many of the same solutions apply: exams can be proctored in other educational institutions, etc.
For an interesting take on online education, persons interested might wish to look at:
Christensen, C. M., Horn, M. B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting Class. How disruptive Innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw Hill.
This book discusses Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and how it might apply to education.
That would be a sad change... I don't think I want to have missed the student life.
Submitter has it backwards - You'd end up with the degree you want, without the knowledge to prove it. Why do you think University of Phoenix is so popular?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Open source education has existed for thousands of years. It used to be called a "library," although lately it's been called "Wikipedia". The simple fact is that if you can read then you can, in fact, educate yourself if you have sufficient time and dedication. Some of the world's greatest geniuses have been self-educated (e.g. Ramanujan). However, it requires much more time and dedication than the average (or even well above average) human seems to have. Self education also requires a substantial amount of high quality public output to demonstrate the education before others will accept it.
I'm biased, of course, since I'm a university professor. I have observed that the top students in my classes are somewhat self-educating anyway. They do the reading on their own, work more homework problems than assigned, and come to me to ask questions that aren't in the book. Most students, however, need constant classroom interaction for motivation as much as elucidation.
To me, the classic moment of college was standing up in a classroom having to defend a position that people disagree with. And then arguing about it later in the cafeteria or dorm. If you've never spent all night arguing over the existence of God, then you never had an education.
I was doing this sort of thing when I was fifteen -- on the internet, with adults [including, by happenstance, a math professor]. There are entire internet forums devoted to arguing about god. Really, are you thinking about what you're saying? Do you realize where you are? If you want all-night arguments, the internet is going to beat any university...
And yes we did have a few drinks or a joint. And yes it's nice to have some girls join you in your intellectual explorations.
The only reason I ever went to university was to meet girls.
Funny you should ask about cheating. A recent study suggests that students on campus cheat more often than their online counterparts. I blogged about it here.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
try to find a localized group that can compete with Undernet's #math for opportunities to talk about advanced math. I doubt one exists in the world; I certainly wouldn't expect to find one at arbitrary university.
The internet is at every university already. Campus denizens are overrepresented in many/most/all online forums. It isn't a question of one or the other, but rather of maximizing the benefit from both styles of communication.
Regarding further examples of subjects difficult to convey over the internet, a friend and I taught each other to juggle in grad school. Not only would it be hard to learn such a skill from even the best juggling website (there are many), but the soul of juggling is in passing balls and clubs between partners. This is an example where internet forums are a supplement to local expertise, e.g., http://www.juggling.org/ which evolved out of a pre-web resource. To tie this to academia, I even met Claude Shannon at a campus juggling event: http://www.juggle.org/history/archives/jugmags/34-2/34-2,p20.htm
Just ask your local drug dealer. I'm pretty sure he will be glad to bring you cadavers in exchange for some of the leftovers from the chemistry lab.
The author doesn't say Internet education is here now. Some entrepreneur is still still sweating the details to get it right.
Probably end up being a combination of e-harmony (social dating), new life (getting laid), moodle (pretending to learn something), World of Warcraft (frats and sororities), Slashdot (bullshitting in the commons), and fantasy football (college sports).
Once some entrepreneur gets it all in one package, it will be a done deal. And the big bonus is all those nights worrying about that girl who missed her period or that guy who tells you he's got some new bumps he didn't notice before last night won't be a problem anymore.
University education has already been made significantly cheaper! The universities are doing it themselves by hiring "adjunct" faculty.
You paid about $5k tuition for each of your freshman semesters, taking calculous, chemistry, english, and history. You had "instructors" for each classes, not professors. Each instructor was paid about $6k for the whole class. TAs are maybe paid slightly more. So the university need only 7 students for each course, the rest is profit.
You can get the same courses for far closer to cost form a community collage, taught by almost equally qualified adjunct instructors. Well, the university must use real professors for more advanced courses. Adjuncts simply won't cut it. So you'll transfer into the university to finish your degree. You still save a bundle.
Why don't you? Easy, social reasons. You'll never meet all the friends & contacts you might have met otherwise.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Is to further the transformation of professors from a collegial model supported by tenure and academic freedom to an underpaid, no-job-security "information transmission technician" temp job to facilitate the extraction of tuition from McStudents.
Is this a question? Scroll further up to 'Kaplan' to know the answer.
This rather tepid article is likely not worth much attention, but it's good for some Sunday morning philosophizing. The premise is that 1) access to content is either high fidelity or high convenience, and that 2) there is an unfilled niche at the high convenience end of the spectrum. This is coming from a purveyor of high cost "enabling" technology.
The first point is rather blatantly obvious. The second appears to be out of touch with current trends. There already are multiple channels to access higher education. In fact, if you don't care about the degree this is the golden age of access to inexpensive and high quality educational opportunities. If you do care about a degree, consider a local community college before corporate vendors like the University of Phoenix. The latter is by no means a cheap degree, BTW.
But the article doesn't address the real question of accreditation. How is a degree from such a "high convenience" vendor going to be worth any more than the same degree from an online diploma factory? It is also naive to think that free curriculum will just appear in a usable form. The internet is full of free access to certain documents - and is completely devoid of free access to other content. A highly skilled practitioner of whatever field is necessary to organize both free and proprietary information into a usable curriculum. What will their motivation be to do this work for free?
The biggest problem is the suggestion that a college campus is "inconvenient". Rather a campus experience is orthogonal to the notion of convenience or inconvenience. Spending four years sequestered with a laptop on your parents' couch is not more convenient - it is merely creepy. College is about experiencing the world and encountering new people, places, ideas and opportunities. You won't find these at home with Judge Judy haranguing a dead-beat dad in the background.
Consider the Star Fleet Academy (or Hogwarts or the Isle of Roke). If ever there was a situation ripe for distance learning, that is it - and yet through several movies and TV series, book after book, the academy is depicted as a physical location shared by students from diverse planets
Hogwarts is a secure site for training kids with wild talents.
It is common ground.
It lies at the core of the secret society which is Rowling's magical world. In that sense, Hogwarts serves the same purpose as a cathedral, a theater, a library, a museum, or a stadium in the muggle world.
To borrow an idea from Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun, the problem with distance learning is distance.
It becomes a substitute for real - social - engagement.
That makes it a dangerous temptation for someone who sees his role as simply a technician.
The military has always understood this, which is why the service academy is so deeply rooted in their traditions.
Did you not take any courses for "personal interest" when you were in college? Here in the US, they're called "electives".
In the UK, these are (usually) not part of your degree. Your degree is in one subject (or sometimes two). There is an implicit assumption that you will acquire a general education on your own while you are at university. I attended lectures on propaganda taught by the politics department for personal interest while I was doing a computer science BSc, for example, but this didn't count toward my degree.
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He's suggesting a two-class society, in which some of us will be alphas and go on to first-class colleges, while the rest of us will be betas and memorize pages from the Internet.
When you go to college, you're in an educational environment 24/7, getting exposed to more ideas and experiences than most people get otherwise in a lifetime.
cbf logging in..
Australian Universities are not all on-campus. Does that mean that my experience/degree from the University of Western Australia is toilet paper?
Many of my classmates worked full-time, mostly in the IT industry and could not necessarily make all of their classes. Yet they - through hard work - graduated with Distinction. Does that make their qualification toilet paper?
Certain degrees cannot be fully taught online. CS can. The higher education market must prepare for changes.
I just remembered that I actually taught an online journalism course. I recommended a couple of textbooks, gave them assignments which we critiqued, linked to examples of good and bad news stories on the Internet, and gave them a running account of a story that I was working on and explained how I did it. I also invited a couple of students in my region to some journalist's events.
I think I did a pretty good job. It was a lot more interactive than reading a textbook and handing in exercises that only a teacher would see.
But it was a much different experience than a lecture or class in person. For example, when I organized lectures in person, I usually brought in a guest speaker.
And the content of my online course was also much more limited than we would have had in a one-hour discussion every week for 12 weeks.
All classes today have an online component. You may be able to give some classes entirely on line.
But the idea of that BusinessWeek column (not an article, I would note) was that some of us will go to universities with classes, and for the rest of us, online classes are good enough.
That's a two-tier education system, and the kids who go to the second tier aren't getting what we used to call a college education. They won't get what the kids in Europe are getting.
And how many undergrad classes use those things?
Perhaps not those things but certainly you should not be allowed to get a physics degree without knowing how to operate an oscilloscope, measure e/m for an electron and perform other classic experiments. All of these require expensive or delicate (or both) equipment that would add thousands of dollars onto a University education.
There are solutions: the Open University in the UK holds lab sessions in local universities. This takes several weeks of the student's time: effectively they do all the lab work at once. However a University education is far more than just sitting in a course and learning about a subject. It's about learning how to take responsibility for your own education, learning how to live your own life away from your parents, learning what subjects really interest you and being exposed to new ideas and different people. You will not get that stuck at home behind your monitor doing online courses!
It is learning all this, as well as your subject, that is what makes university graduates more successful, on average, that those who skip university. Unless you are taking a job training course that is a requirement for a specific career I see little value in these purely, online universities because you miss half of what university teaches you.
The simulation always works the way it says in the book.
Exactly: supposing the physics in the book happens to be wrong? How are you ever going to discover anything new without doing real experiments? Simulations are a useful educational tool but learning how to do real experiments is essential. If we relied on simulations we would never have discovered relativity or quantum mechanics because every simulation would have been made to agree with Newtonian mechanics.
I don't know about the original poster but I am not affiliated with the OU nor have I taken any of their courses but I would reiterate the point that they are successful and fulfil a very useful educational niche. I would certainly not rank their degrees as being as good as an established UK university but I would take them as at least equivalent to a degree from the polytechnic-Universities. They have some very clever solutions to the distance problem and actively develop Open Source software - particularly Moodle.
The OU actively develops Moodle, particularly the quiz module. This works on all machines since it is a web application. You can also get several of their courses via iTunesU which is hardly Windows-based!
I so much want this to happen. I left college in 1981 in my sophomore year to work in the field I love, software engineering. I have done many projects that would be worth a PhD if done in the academic context. Much of my career I have worked with PhD credentialed peers. Yet I have no such paper. Beyond the paper, there are things particularly in the more theoretical and research areas that I would like to know much more of. Many of these I do explore with online resources and in books. However I get no credit for these things. I can't use them to gain admittance to say a PhD program. I can't use them to be admitted to a more research oriented project.
I have checked what it would take to pick up this paper in an accredited way many times. The answer with brick and mortar is to take many years off earning an good income and sit in a desk. The online options are not sufficiently accredited. If there were online options with no mandatory time duration and testing out on an all required courses and full accreditation that would be ideal. I suspect it would be ideal to millions of others also.
As the need for continuous re-education and learning increases how can we as a society afford to not make it as efficient and accessible and fully accredited as possible?
A lot of assumptions are that the main value of college is the college experience, as opposed to the class learning time. How about a hybrid spirit quest version of college where a small tribe of students go on the road for a couple years taking classes and taking in the world?
I recently read an article which compared the lifetime earnings of someone who earns an average amount with a high school degree versus someone who earns an average amount with a Bachelors degree. The conclusion was that when one factors in lost earnings and student loans, the person who got a job right out of high school will do better on average than someone who gets a Bachelors degree.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Now if only we could rid the Ed environment of Blackboard we might get somewhere. If there is anything slowing down online education it's BB patents and attitude.
Where would you start with being critical of that crap? The 1980 forum software, the hacked up interface, the difficulty of even keeping it working?
One institution here won't provide BB access for campus students because it increases licence costs.
My lecturers who are spread across 5 different universities all agree that online students work harder and produce superior assignments. Certainly something that is impacted by the age of online students being 30+ generally compared to campus students mostly just out of school.
Assessment techniques for online student vary depending on institution and subject. There are a couple of paractices used.
1. Individual unique assignments with point scoring for discussion participation
2. Testing using online multiple choice where time limits and question numbers don't give time for looking up answers.
3. Exam hall finals.
Generally I think 1 is the better choice. With online course I think assessment needs to be linked tightly to participation, at least in the first year, to create a ethos of contribution.
The problem I see is that some unis who put up online courses are just plain greedy and stick in way too many students. But they do that on campus as well. You need to be one brave lecturer to set individual assignment for classes over 30 students. The assessment marking time is too extreme on 200 student courses.
was alot cheaper than college. I work on cars everyday. I can also track the sun with solar panels and read CAN bus with arduino and elm327 ;> FOSS and internet FTW
I am in it for both personal and professional reasons. I left school in 1982. I have no tertiary education at all (barring 3 months of A levels). And yet I have travelled the world, learned computing - both hardware and software, met thousands of interesting people, and had a pretty fulfilling social life. And I have earned a living while doing those things. Now I am bored, and frustrated by the lack of challenges I have signed up for a BSc (Hons) Degree in Computing and Systems Practice. I want to learn as much about the area I work and play in as I can. But this time, I will have something at the end that will prove that I did the work. I already know lots more than your average student in lots of areas, but other than being spot tested, I have no means of proving it.
I can't afford to take 3 years off work to attend a physical university. I am 43 years old, the "student life" is part of my past. So I have enrolled with the OU and start next month. Maybe I'll find it hard, or maybe I'll love it and do well. I don't care at this point. It's for my own education, and as I will be nearly 50 when I finish this course, I seriously doubt it will help me find employment. But combined with my existing knowledge, my existing contacts, and my desire to progress in my chosen field, I think it will be worthwhile. You "real" students can scoff all you like, it isn't really relevant. And I will also have the means of discovering whether educational standards have really dropped over the last 27 years. Considering a course I have just taken was rated as equivalent to A level, and I already knew most of the content before I started, I'm not too optimistic on that count. No wonder 95% of students are passing Advanced level subjects. Or maybe I should have listened to my father when I was 18 and stuck with college then gone to university. Guess I'll never know. I have no regrets though. Computing is a completely different subject now than it was in 1982. The horizons have expanded greatly. The greatest exposure to it at school was the fat geeks playing with their ZX Spectrums instead of sports, girls and alcohol. I knew then I wasn't ever going to willingly be part of their world.
I live in a University city, and am surrounded by arrogant little fucks who a) think they are gods gift to the world, b) think they are superior to everybody who isn't a student and c) are basically clueless about life. These people have a shock coming to them. Their elitist attitude explains a lot about the so called "professional" world. Maybe they should have classes in basic humility alongside their other work. They all complain about student loans and how much debt they'll have when they graduate, but they spend more in the bars than I can afford to, and I work 60 or 70 hours a week. Cry me a river.
It is very convenient to keep the proles stupid - and take their money whilst doing it.
As the parent and great-grandparent posters, suggest the traditional education at university is not just the lectures, even ignoring the science labs. It is largely about the overall experience and personal growth.
I spent time with nearly all my professors outside of the classroom, formally or informally, talking both class related matters or about life in general. I had some great peers, in and outside the lecture halls and seminar rooms.
The four years spent at university getting an undergraduate degree was largely a time spent becoming an independent adult. Becoming able to take care of, and think, for myself. I went through a huge amount of emotional and personal growth, I use to joke, and there was more than a germ of truth to it, that I learnt more outside of class than I did in my "formal" part of my education.
And finally one reason I prefer to see students who graduate from a four year university degree, to students who graduate from a two-year diploma from a college during interviews, besides the focus on fundamentals which doesn't become obsolete, is simply that they have completed a four-year commitment of study.
Certainly, the value placed on the the "credentials/piece of paper" is part of what gives universities their market
I understand how the nonsensicalness of this can be frustrating
Yet, although the information is out there, let's be honest: A lot of people (myself included) probably need the formal structure to get their butt in gear. Congratulations to those who don't need that pressure, "you're a better man than I."
This pressure is useful on the boring-but-necessary fundamentals in particular; I admit this can often descend into boring-and-not-really-that-necessary.
Also, the university environment can be good at organizing the information into more-absorbable forms (a subset of this is the presentation skills and relatable personal experiences of the good professors.)
FWIW, I'm in a BSc program at a good private school, not "Hahvahd-level"
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Per this article, a bachelor's degree is worth almost twice a high school diploma in lifetime earning power: $1.2M over a lifetime for a HS grad, $2.1M lifetime for a BS.