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

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.