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“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, gave the university’s blessing to Thrun’s experiment, which he calls “an initial demonstration,” but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitized university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialized programs and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education — for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.

As The Times’s Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work — training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.

“When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable — as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience — and when is it secondary to the learning process?”

develop coping skills, life skills, and team skills so they can create a satisfying philosophy by which to live and by which to contribute to the general welfare

General education is a corollary of liberal education

“quality of life” issues for these students to help them succeed in fulfilling careers and contribute to the betterment of society

they are strategically located in the right places

the colleges are still primarily staffed by part-time faculty who instruct a study body that is primarily part-time. These are not the best conditions for taking on a mandate to change the world.

When the social order is rumbling with change, when new movements are afoot, when fear stalks the land, when money flows from the heavens — when there is a tectonic shift in the community college zeitgeist — there is great opportunity to change our routine; there is opportunity for significant reform

“learning” is the same thing, or at least is deeply reflected, in what we mean by degree and certificate completion

pendulum

balance

overall purpose and what we mean by a truly educated person

Today we must prepare students for the challenges of changing careers and jobs five or six times in their lives

It took years to purge the idea of the “terminal” degree from the community college lexicon and years more to embed the principles of lifelong learning into our programs and practices

students need the skills to succeed in an initial job, but they also need the skills to cope with changes in the economy and the culture — skills to transition into their next job

“The way you teach a language is not about grammar; it's about communication skills,” Yan says. “So that face-to-face aspect has to be there…. It should never be done by students checking out a website and doing drills. That is not my idea of an online course.”

But in general Ruth, who teaches Spanish, says he remains wary of where offering online degrees in relatively low-demand languages might lead. “We don’t want this to leak into the areas where real interest lies and where real instructors are,” he says.