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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."
I completed a degree program online. Took me three years to do it. The way they (sort of) got around this was to have actual sittings for exams in various places throughout the country for each semester. These exams covered bits from the entire previous semester and would be difficult to just waltz in and take without actually doing the coursework.
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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.
It's precisely this fact that makes me discourage students from online distance education whenever possible. Both in undergrad and grad school, I learned way more from random discussions, be they with other students or professors, than I ever did during the official class time. So much of an education is had by being around others who are also interested in the same things and eager to talk about it.
Actuall, UofP is VERY good for certain types of degrees. Computer Science being one of them. While I don't have a degree from UofP, I have worked with IT people who do, and they were smart, motivated, well educated people.
Let's face it, you DO NOT need to physically be in a classroom to learn computer science. Hell, most old line universities are so far behind the IT curve that it's become a bit of a joke in the IT field.
Yes, there are some courses where you really do still need a physical location. Most of the physical sciences and medicine fall into that category. But for most other courses, there are no "labs" to go to. Why not virtualize them? Assuming it is done well (and like physical schools, there would be good and bad ones) there isn't any good reason why we shouldn't be able to it.
Unless of course you are a stodgy, dusty, moldy old Prof who can't change his or her ways and just want to rail against market forces performing the creative destruction they always do. In that case, all I can say is that it sucks to be you.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Really..
Chemistry degree here. I've yet to see a 'timmy tries chemisty' set that has a rotovap, access to a nmr, mass-spec or X-ray crystallography. I had hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment at my disposal, and this was a univ with a chem department of about 60 people, including students and faculty. The standard equipment that each student was issued in Organic cost well over a thousand.
Get real.
Gone!