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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."
You are absolutely wrong. Many online schools are very successful. I have an Associate, Bachelors, and Masters degree from online, regionally accredited schools (accredited by the same organizations that accredit UCLA, Stanford, and Harvard) and have been promoted ahead of my peers and been very successful. I have also attended on-campus classes and I have learned more, become more disciplined, and benefited more from my online experiences. Also, many entrepreneurs have succeeded HUGELY in the higher education market. Look at Kaplan, the private for-profit orrganization that owns some schools and is a bigger contributor to the revenues of the Washington Post than the newspaper side of that house. Do some research and drop your obvious bias (yes, I am biased in the other direction because I have constantly had to deal with people, who have no idea what they are talking about, insulting those who worked hard for the same level of education but either couldn't or didn't want to attend a brick and mortar)
$6000/year for everything?! Enjoy that while it lasts!
Um, hate to break it to you but the University of Phoenix doesn't even OFFER a real computer science degree, they offer a lot of bullshit "IT" degrees, meaning they don't teach any of the real fundamentals(and no math beyond middle school algebra) behind how computers work, how to evaluage algorithms etc. They do offer some classes handholding you on technology that will probably be obsolete in a few years, if that's useful.
I guess I'm just an elitist, but I found that people who never studied any real computer science tend to write really shitty code(largely because they don't have the analytic abilities and because they don't really know whats going on behind the scenes).
Monstar L
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.