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."

Comments

Re:One sentence discredits the whole article

[d3ac0n]

As Dijkstra said, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

Computer science is not IT.

The fact that you seem to believe that computer science is more than tangentially related to the IT field leads me to doubt your views have merit in this subject.

Well no shit CS isn't IT. And yet most IT jobs have, as a requirement, at LEAST a BS in CS.

No, it doesn't make sense. But that's non-technical HR people for you. The fact that you don't seem to have run into this yet suggests to me that you haven't ever applied for an IT position, much less worked in the field, and that YOUR views have a remarkably small amount of merit on this subject.

What is this, teenager day on /.?