Tuesday, February 7, 2012

John Naughton: Welcome to the desktop degree

created three courses at Stanford University show that the free education online can compete with traditional teaching methods

Once upon a time, long ago, in 1995 to be exact, a scholar named Eli Noam has published an article in the prestigious journal

Science

under "electronics and the bleak future of the university." In this paper, Professor Noam said that the basic model of the university - which had been stable for hundreds of years - could be threatened by technology communication network

In the classical model, the universities were institutions that have created, stored and disseminated knowledge. If students and researchers who want access to this knowledge, they had to come to university. However, Noam has argued, the Internet would jeopardize this model raises the question memorably by Howard Rheingold in the 1980s: "Where is the Library of Congress, when in my office," If all the knowledge stored in the world can be accessed from any network device, and if the materials and the best academic conferences are also available online, why students pay taxes and go into debt to live in cramped quarters for three years? Qu ' Is that the USP of the traditional university when their monopolies in the storage and dissemination eroded?

If it was a good question in 1995 is much better today. The answers offered by traditional universities over the years varies by state and mission. Some universities are in denial and said that "dark future" Noam not happen to them. Some have decided that their FSU - elite brands - would protect them against the coming storm. Others decided that 'they would be mainly driven by joint research with undergraduate education is considered a tedious task that could be done by qualified instructors. Some experimented with distance learning and the illusion of having put his training "content" online could solve the problem. But these answers are different, all universities agree on one thing: the end, students must come to them because the universities which would provide appropriate credentials. QED.

Take the "Introduction to bird flu", of course, for example. It is based on a course taught to students at Stanford and classic introduces students to basic concepts of artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, robotics and natural language processing. Taught by Sebastian Thrun, who besides being a professor at Stanford University and an expert in robotics is also vice- president of Google, Peter Norvig, Google director of research. And it's very serious academic - an undergraduate or graduate early which requires approximately 10 hours per week, was assignments and midterm exams and weekly end. To receive a "declaration of conformity", students must take both exams.

The company statistics are intriguing: 160,000 students enrolled, more than 190 countries, with an average age of about 30. But the real surprise is that about 23,000 of them have stayed the course and finished. A friend of mine, Seb Schmoller, took him and reports that it was worth, but very difficult to address. The project was so successful that Professor Thrun has created a spin-off plan to enroll 500,000 students in its first two years:. "Building a search engine" and "Programming a robotic vehicle"

Now one could argue that Thrun (and Stanford) just a few steps on a path that was provided for the MIT and the University of our own Open - content pedagogy sophisticated online - and it's true. But so far, universities have refused to give their offers degrees online for free. This too will change: from this spring, students take free online courses at MIT, for a small fee, give them the academic qualifications, if they pass the evaluation
The game is, people. Who says a boiling pot ever seen?


Find best price for : --Thrun--

0 comments:

Blog Archive

Blog Archive

About Me