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

Erm.... Labs?

[kombipom]

Small problem with that idea in the physical sciences, a simulated lab isn't much use for hands on experience.

Re:Erm.... Labs?

[QuantumRiff]

I'm pretty sure its impossible to ship out Cadavers for anatomy classes.

Re:Erm.... Labs?

[schnikies79]

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.

One sentence discredits the whole article

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:One sentence discredits the whole article

[SoVeryTired]

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.

The Open University in the UK did just that, and they did it really successfully.

Re:Yes - and?

[nbauman]

I don't see what the big deal here is, although I haven't RTFA (of course).

One of the things I learned from college was that if you don't do the reading, you won't know what's going on in class.