By Azer Bestavros
Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
A provocative article by Clay Shirky (writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies) entitled Napster, Udacity, and the Academy makes parallels between the Music Industry and the Higher Education “industry”.
Quoting from the end of the article:
“In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.”
E-textbooks log student reading habits
This article in the Chronicle of Higehr Education discusses how e-Textbooks could be used to report back to instructors the reading habits of their students. Also, here is a blog that raises concerns about such capabilities labeling them as “spying” on students.
Elite education at half price?!
A start-up called the Minerva Project is setting up an online university in which students live together in “dorm clusters” so that they will benefit from the social aspects of university life. An article entitled A True Elite Education at Half the Price examines the Minerva Project and its potential. It implies that the university will accept the first class in 2014.
The Crisis in Higher Education
The Crisis in Higher Education is an article published in MIT Technology Review which attempts to answer the question of whether on-line courses are a fad or a transformative development.
How “open” are MOOCs?
How ‘Open’ Are MOOCs? discusses the “fine prints” in the terms of service for MOOCs that may restrict the extent they may be used in a formal education setting.
Helping students teach themselves
This is an interesting blog on How technology is helping students teach themselves?! One quote from the blog: “None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But, after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.”
A Lecture Heard ‘Round The World
BU Today published an article summarizing the work of the Council on Educational Technology and Learning Innovation. The article by Rich Barlow, entitled "A Lecture Heard 'Round The World", examines a number of ways that BU might leverage and contribute to emerging on-line educational technologies and services, and to the increased connectedness.
Future of the trillion-dollar education business?
Technology Review published an article entitled The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years which poses the question: “Students anywhere are being offered free instruction online. What will that do to the trillion-dollar education business?
Year of the MOOC
The NYT published an article entitled “The Year of the MOOC” -- a good read to get up to speed on the feverish development of MOOCs.
Straw Man #1
Consider this unique on-line platform:
- Students register for a MOOC-style course that parallels an existing regular BU course for a nominal fee (e.g., $20). The course is asynchronous in the sense that the student can proceed at his/her own pace as long as they finish within (say) a year, or even two.
- For an additional fee (e.g., $200), BU students registered for the course are allowed to tap into specific resources supported by BU (e.g., tutors, supervised projects, access to experimental platforms, access to data sets, licensed materials and content, etc.)
- For an additional fee (e.g., $2,000), students would travel to campus (or even one of BU’s remote campuses) during the summer term and spend two weeks for an immersive capstone experience (e.g., participate in a group project, visit local museums, participate in a lab rotation, etc.) At the end of this on-campus engagement, students take a test or are otherwise evaluated and given a grade.
- Students get BU credit for courses completed in this fashion.
Questions:
- What types of courses fit this platform, but not other platforms (such as Coursera, EdX, 2u.com, etc.)? Can you give examples?
- If this platform proves successful (say 10,000 students end up completing all the above), what would be the impact on the BU brand? What would be the impact of existing programs (e.g., summer term)? What would be the impact on recruitment?
- BU students may opt to take some of their courses on this platform and get BU credit at a lower expense. What type of students may opt to do so? What would be the impact on tuition revenue? What would be the impact on retention?
- What current BU resources could be leveraged to support such a platform? What new resources (including some creative combination of existing platforms) would be needed?
- What might an experiment (or sets of experiments) to test the possibility of adopting such a platform look like?
