JUST as the University of California prepares to announce its first group of
fully online courses for its undergraduates, the California State University
announced this week that it, too, will begin to expand its computer-based
options for its 412,000 students.
One of nations best University systems, University of California, is about to start its first group of fully online courses for undergraduates. At the same time, the California State Universities (CSU) starting its computer-based options for its 412,000 students. Currently, there are master's degrees in 63 disciplines entirely online. Some educators are skeptical and raise concern on cheating and of "walmartaization" of CSU education.
"Minerva..... is an entirely different pedagogical species. The San Francisco-based company aims at a soup-to-nuts undergraduate education, resulting in a traditional bachelor's degree, but all via the Web, and with all of the social cachet of the country's priciest sheepskin.
....Nelson, its 36-year-old founder, has no experience in education; .....But Nelson managed to not only score a huge investment from Benchmark - the same VC firm that backed the likes of eBay, Yelp, and Mint -but also persuaded a group of A-list luminaries, including former Harvard president Larry Summers, to be on its board of advisors.
"In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it's a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs."
Results of an opinion poll commissioned by Dell comparing technology use in schools in the US, Germany, and China. There's a bit of we're-falling-behind-China hysteria here, I think, but it does highlight some opportunities.
Also, Dell's Education Challenge is investing $30,000 in university student (graduate or undergraduate) projects to innovate learning in K-12 schools. Deadline is at the end of October. http://www.dellchallenge.org/k12
The most high-tech classrooms in India are not at a university but at a technology company's training facility.
To make up for those perceived deficiencies, Indian companies spent more than $1-billion last year on corporate-training programs for new employees, according to an industry group that has been pushing for change at universities.
Each classroom bears the name of a famous innovator—Archimedes, J.P. Morgan, Steve Jobs. In a morning class in the Benjamin Franklin classroom, I observed about 100 students learning the Unix programming language. Each seat had its own PC, and most students had opened a copy of the instructor's PowerPoint presentation and followed along on their own screen, sometimes scrolling back to see what they had missed, sometimes looking ahead.
The trainees, called "freshers" because they are fresh out of college,
The trainees said that their undergraduate teaching had been delivered mostly in chalk-and-talk form, with the professor lecturing at the front of the classroom. A few professors had tried PowerPoint, they said, but even that was unusual.
"More technology would have meant a lot more knowledge."
It turns out, how wired the classrooms are is not the point—the style of teaching is much slower to change than the gear in the rooms.
Indian college classrooms have not integrated technology into learning and teaching, so private companies - teaching the skills needed to perform in their specific career paths - are taking the lead, showing that universities need to catch up.
I wish my undergraduate experience had looked more like this :-) how cool! Check out the vision, mission, and goals of the school of interactive games and media...some interesting reading. Thanks for sharing!