Comments on: Decentralizing education: how startups are dismantling the university

By: Fullervision@me.com

Fullervision@me.com — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 05:29:12 +0000

I like your wacky idea, kind a like a usage panel as is common for dictionaries.

By: smb12321

smb12321 — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 18:55:47 +0000

I attended an excellent university and can honestly say that my relationship with my teacher or professor was a distant secondary to the data. yes, socialization is great but it should not be the basis of an education. Originally the idea of students gathering with one teacher was to maximize the teacher. It’s exactly why online leaning can be so powerful.

By: gary

gary — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:07:06 +0000

Accreditation is the issue. Why not administer a written exam at some designated location and then standardize the results by paying graduates from traditional universities to take the same exam simultaneously. The latter have an interest in performing well so that they can assert the value of the academic credentials they’ve received from traditional institutions.

By: Katherine MacLean (old science fiction writer and research fan

Katherine MacLean (old science fiction writer and research fan — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 02:14:38 +0000

Repetition does not work for me. Verbal directions to remember later do not come back in memory when I need them. The way I learned things was by trying to do something I admired other people for doing, following the steps in the action, usually out of sequence and some done wrong, and stubbornly correcting and repeating each step until I got the right results.. I learned slide rule and basic chemistry and followed and assisted a skilled engineer. The routine of doing and producing had me at age 15 doing quality inspection of intake ingredients at a food factory, adjusting the treatment and cooking to standardize the flavor and texture and secure that the sterility is kept total. This is known as quality control and my skill was watched by the rich executives and the workmen at lunch tasted and approved. 13 to 15 years old and it was better than a sports vacation. When did we of America abandon apprenticing as education? Blacksmiths and farmers let kids help and learn. Teaching was hard for them and they charged for their time and room and board for their apprentices.working with fire and heat and molten metal, that is action adventure.

By: Bri

Bri — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:01:10 +0000

I should have read this article before I posted to the others. Not that it diminishes what I wrote, but that it does address some of my own thoughts. As tech moves forward, we will be able to attend virtual classes. Avatars of all manner will congregate in virtual spaces. ( yes that’s a talking lion sitting next to you, and Elvis hasn’t left the building yet!). Virtual field trips are possible, and when strong AI becomes available, an infinite number of one on one teachers can tutor you in any endeavor. This will all be relatively short lived, in reference to jobs. Robots will take them all.

By: Dale Ziemianski

Dale Ziemianski — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 21:44:26 +0000

I’m thinking that the more experience these online course gain, the more credible they’ll become to potential employer. As a freelancer who is entirely self taught, I can see how a little guidance and consolidation of knowledge can go a long way to educating the general public on practically any subject.

In addition to my artistic skills, I taught myself HTML and CSS using Notepad, I taught myself how to use a spreadsheet to not only keep track of my time (and dollars) but to break up the invoice into individual job totals for my client. I taught myself how to find work online, how to market my skills through target marketing, as well as how to use several image editing/manipulating programs to work in digital illustration, all from youtube videos, PDFs and online forums.

All I had to do was search for the knowledge I needed. If someone were to put together a guidance plan to aim students in the right direction, to show them where to gain the knowledge they need, I think they can do anything. It would certainly have saved me time.

By: Editor

Editor — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 21:17:22 +0000

Joel, in my experience, it’s different when one is taking on online course to actually learn something (not just get a degree), which is why the MITx discussion forums are so popular (http://www.kurzweilai.net/lessons-learned-from-mitxs-prototype-course).

By: Matheus

Matheus — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:31:01 +0000

Fully agreed, Dan. Education is not only about absorbing previously existing knowledge. It´s main purpose (in my opinion) should be to create conditions for students to learn to think, and that cannot be fully replaced by online education. Human contact, discussion, exchange of ideas are as good as any other educational tool available. That being said, descentralized education may indeed play an important role in complementing and diversifying education.

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:43:31 +0000

“One problem in the feedback system that has not been addressed is the role of mentoring and coaching traditionally provided by a teacher.”

Attending the University of Illinois 10 years ago, i can tell you that not 1 in 100 students utilize this, even if it is available.

By: star0

star0 — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:31:26 +0000

Several large colleges are taking online education very seriously at the moment; but administrators seem quite confident that it won’t create a major upset to “business as usual” — instead, they see it as an opportunity to expand the reach of universities even further, as well as to provide even better education to existing students. I should know, since I have attended some of these meetings, and am well aware of what they think; there’s not the slightest bit of worry.

One thing I learned from one of these meetings is that online courseware and platforms has been around for some time now (I’m not talking about the kind of online courses that have been around for decades), and that there were several companies spun-off from some major universities (I forget the names of those companies and the universities they were affiliated with — I seem to recall that one of them was Yale, but I could be wrong) that completely failed. The lesson I was told to take away from this was, “Nobody has even a clue what this will look like in 3 years; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

I happen to be a techno-optimist; but I also am someone who is circumspect about what I say to university administrators; and I KNOW that techno-optimism would be viewed as crazy talk (I recently sent around an email about some of Wolfram’s grand visions about the future of Mathematica, and they thought it was the dumbest thing they’d ever heard — imagine what they would think about the prospect of online education seriously challenging the status quo).

By: Max Lent

Max Lent — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:34:14 +0000

I fully agree with Dan’s post. There is no doubt that some students will benefit from these alternative educational tools. It is, however, a hundred years too early to suggest that traditional educational systems are being dismantled.
What is great about these alternative educational strategies is that they challenge traditional education. Competition is good. Traditional educational systems need to be constantly re-evaluated and best practices executed.
The larger idea is that education should be free. Instead of charging students to go to college, we should be paying them.

By: dan

dan — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:23:45 +0000

The future seems to be moving towards this; bad idea. Having attended both regular education, and the type described above I can honestly say neither is the solution.
Regular education is hopelessly outdated and poor quality compared to the best science available today. However the new distance learning will not solve this at all; the ONLY predictive measure of a students success remains the relationship to the teacher, and you take precisely that away.
There will be some who do ok, some who do well – but none will do as well as they could, and there’s not going to be any good double-blind study that shows this is the best plan. They may do better than regular education, but that bar is pretty low…
The reason seems to be because the rest of society is so poorly organised they can no longer deal with the numbers; there’s so many students normal education can’t deal with it, so rather than questioning whether there should be plans for more teachers [or god forbid, less people...] the answer seems to be ford-ism – just throw the population on a large factory line and let them watch videos and distance chat with one another. Something that doesn’t solve the problems of a good quality relationship to the teacher, or social skills – as more and more digital age children who just ‘shut off’ online participants in an argument seem to struggle when reaching the face to face world.