A New Project in Online Education

[ysabetwordsmith]

I spotted this interesting article about plans for an online university:

On the Internet, a university without a campus
An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

"The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia," said Shai Reshef, an entrepreneur and founder of several previous Internet-based educational businesses. "The open source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free. We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection."

This has potential. I suspect that it's easier to build a successful online school with plenty of funding to pay good teachers. The sliding scale for student fees is prudent. This project has a chance; I'd love to see it succeed. But wow, I hope the organizers talk to some folks who have already done this. There are a lot of pitfalls in the field of online education, and many of them aren't where you'd expect.

Comments

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

They will probably run into other problems along the way; I've started working with the School of Information's OpenCourseware initiative here, and the courses are pretty bare-bones. They'll have the syllabus, a reading list perhaps, maybe lecture slides (which will have either cleaned out all copyrighted material or gone through a lengthy process to get permission to use them), and I suppose if the professor created them and gave permission for them to be used, there might be recordings of the lectures.

But probably one of the hardest things to deal with will be the lack of access to recent literature. Without paying out money, you aren't getting access to libraries or databases; you can't get most of the things on your average reading list off of the internet. You might not even be able to get them from a local public or university library.

And that, I suspect, is where there might be major problems. Finding high-quality teachers without being able to pay them will be problematic, but without the access to the literature that supports the courses, there will be further problems.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

When I say "write classes" I mean write classes. I actually had one high school teacher who distributed handouts instead of a textbook: he couldn't find a book that met his standards, so he just wrote things himself, which were much better than history textbooks. Online classes can be taught from a textbook or reading list, but they don't have to be if your teachers know the material well enough to present it themselves. But that takes time and work; if you don't pay people decently, few of them are willing to do that. I've used both methods in my online classes.

[glitteringlynx.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I had a link to a university which had put all of its older course material up for free. For everything. Now, some of it was kinda difficult to use out of context, but it could easily be incorporated by other teachers or used for practise by other students.

I have so many interests, I love anything like this. Mind you, free is better.

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

If you find that material again, I'd love to see it. I'm particularly interested in distance learning for linguistics, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

There's an inherent tension between "information wants to be free" and "you get what you pay for." Both are true as far as they go; neither covers the whole of human knowledge. The more complicated and esoteric the knowledge you seek, the more likely you'll get better results from buying it. It's not just that payment tends to attract more skilled contributors -- it's also that people deserve to profit from their hard work and they're more able to afford to do it if they get paid. What I see evolving online is that much basic material and some intermediate material is available free, but premium and advanced services cost. I think that's a reasonable balance.

As a writer, I deal with similar issues, in various genres and formats. Everyone can read my blog for free and enjoy my voice, my casual musings, and short descriptions of how to do stuff. People who want detailed writing instructions can go buy Composing Magic. Everyone can contribute prompts in my poetry fishbowls and read the posted poems. People who want to see a specific poem or share it with others can sponsor it. So far this seems to work fairly well.

[silverdust-wolf.livejournal.com]

I actually have a comment to make ! Whoo hoo! I guess it's sort of like becoming a minister for a church. There are soo many online ways to do that and a lot of free courses offered as well. I wonder why those places have a higher sucession rate than those of free online universities? Then again, thanks to our politicians here in Illinois, you can just pay the some-odd price of 20$ and have a minister license just like that. I don't even think they ask for which denomination you want to be a part of. Atleast the non-free university online courses are pretty sucessful.