[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 edXs 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 Kollers 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 cant 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
Millss 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 theres 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 worlds 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 classs 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 youll 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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