[LINK] World Education

stephen at melbpc.org.au stephen at melbpc.org.au
Sun Jan 27 22:11:24 AEDT 2013


If the Internet does nothing else, this is enough ..

"Revolution Hits the Universities"

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN  Published: January 26, 2013 33 Comments
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/friedman-revolution-
hits-the-universities.html?src=me&ref=general>


Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer 
scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks 
ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. 

When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses 
taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. 

Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 
universities, including eight international ones. 

Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence 
lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard 
are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 
students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. 
intro class on circuits. 

“That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year 
history,” he said. 

Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still 
tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I am 
convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much 
broader demographic. 

Imagine how this might change U.S. foreign aid. 

For relatively little money, the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian 
village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite Internet 
access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any Egyptian 
who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in the world, 
subtitled in Arabic. 

YOU just have to hear the stories told by the pioneers in this industry 
to appreciate its revolutionary potential. 

One of Koller’s favorites is about “Daniel,” a 17-year-old with autism 
who communicates mainly by computer. He took an online modern poetry 
class from Penn. He and his parents wrote that the combination of 
rigorous academic curriculum, which requires Daniel to stay on task, and 
the online learning system that does not strain his social skills, 
attention deficits or force him to look anyone in the eye, enable him to 
better manage his autism. Koller shared a letter from Daniel, in which he 
wrote: “Please tell Coursera and Penn my story. I am a 17-year-old boy 
emerging from autism. I can’t yet sit still in a classroom so [your 
course] was my first real course ever. During the course, I had to keep 
pace with the class, which is unheard-of in special ed. Now I know I can 
benefit from having to work hard and enjoy being in sync with the world.” 

One member of the Coursera team who recently took a Coursera course on 
sustainability told me that it was so much more interesting than a 
similar course he had taken as an undergrad. 

The online course included students from all over the world, from 
different climates, incomes levels and geographies, and, as a 
result, “the discussions that happened in that course were so much more 
valuable and interesting than with people of similar geography and income 
level” in a typical American college. 

Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote an essay in The 
Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall about his experience teaching a 
class through Coursera: “A few months ago, just as the campus of 
Princeton University had grown nearly silent after commencement, 40,000 
students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free 
course in introductory sociology. ... My opening discussion of C. Wright 
Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close 
reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line. I 
asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in the 
lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I usually 
receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however, within a few 
hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with 
hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were 
thousands. ... Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my 
sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which 
significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.”


LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, 
but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful 
about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online 
higher education. 

Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by 
providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job 
they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to 
solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to 
enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online 
course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of 
Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like 
Coursera and Udacity.


Agarwal of edX tells of a student in Cairo who was taking the circuits 
course and was having difficulty. In the class’s online forum, where 
students help each other with homework, he posted that he was dropping 
out. In response, other students in Cairo in the same class invited him 
to meet at a teahouse, where they offered to help him stay in the course. 

And, a 15-year-old student in Mongolia who took the same class as part of 
a blended course and received a  perfect score on the final exam, added 
Agarwal, is now applying to M.I.T. and the University of California, 
Berkeley

As we look to the future of higher education, said the M.I.T. president, 
L. Rafael Reif, something that we now call a “degree” will be a 
concept “connected with bricks and mortar” — and traditional on-campus 
experiences that will increasingly leverage technology and the Internet 
to enhance classroom and laboratory work. 

Alongside that, though, said Reif, many universities will offer online 
courses to students anywhere in the world, in which they will 
earn “credentials” — certificates that testify that they have done the 
work and passed all the exams. The process of developing credible 
credentials that verify that the student has adequately mastered the 
subject — and did not cheat — and can be counted on by employers is still 
being perfected by all the MOOCs. But once it is, this phenomenon will 
really scale. 

I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by 
taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the 
world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, 
some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only 
the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. 

It will change teaching, learning and the pathways to employment. “There 
is a new world unfolding,” said Reif.

Cheers,
Stephen



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