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The 2011 Horizon Report is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative An EDUCAUSE Program

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is a globally focused not-for-profit consortium dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. Its hundreds of member institutions constitute an elite list of the most highly regarded colleges, universities, and museums in the worlds.

The ELI is a community of higher education institutions and organizations committed to advancing learning through information technology (IT) innovation.

But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on  something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

Thiel notes a handful of students told him that whether they were selected or not, they were leaving school to start a company. Many more built tight relationships with competing applicants during the brief Silicon Valley retreat– a sort of support group of like-minded restless students.

Of course, if the problem Thiel sees with the higher education bubble is elitism, why were so many of the invitees Ivy League kids? Where were the smart inner-city kids let down by economic blight and a failing education system of a city like Detroit; the kids who need to be lifted up the most?

As for those other 18 credits, Cencich and Khalil say they are confident that students will learn just as well online as they did in the classroom.

For professors, it means that no one would be losing his or her job — for now, anyway

PASSHE faces the usual doubts about fully online language instruction — especially in the context of a whole degree program, which would theoretically shepherd students all the way from ignorance to proficiency without ever having them cross the threshold of a classroom.

In addition to exploring their diverse backgrounds, students will discuss the language challenges graduates face as many work overseas, Hampton said. "They're going to be living in a multilingual context, and that's a really interesting thing for them to think about," he said.

The voice samples will be attached anonymously to an interactive world map so other participants can hear them, and each student will be matched through a voice recognition program with five others who have similar pronunciations, Johnson said.

With about 30% of incoming UC Berkeley students reporting that English was not their first language, exploring that linguistic diversity is a good way to help students feel comfortable at such a large school, faculty organizers said.