Posted on 03/21/2011 2:26:37 PM PDT by decimon
"In the online world you don't need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don't need to be trapped into a lecture timetable," says Peter Scott, director of the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute.
The Open University, the UK's open access university, which allows people to study from home in their own time, has been an international pioneer of degree courses online.
The university, with more than 263,000 students in 23 countries, has become a record breaker on the iTunes U service, which provides a digital library of materials for university students and staff.
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But it's not the elite universities where the idea of online study is going to make its biggest impact, suggests Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's US-based vice-president of worldwide education.
"When talking to folks in places like Dubai and China I thought that the questions and the admiration would be for institutions like Harvard and Stanford.
"However, the actual part of the US education system that is most envied, that other institutions are trying to replicate, is the community college system in the US, founded on a belief that a degree and opportunity are rights for all citizens. And we have got to enable the population of students attending higher education to scale up.
"One of the things about the community college system in the US - Miami Dade College for example - is that it is very connected to employment and the workforce.
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(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
I have really enjoyed distance learning.
Hopefully this trend will put a lot of commie professors out of work.
Thanks for posting. Looks very interesting.
Great, start off your entire reason for existence on a false premise.
That being said, I wish the Marxist-infected traditional university system a swift death. There is nothing it can do that online education can't do better, faster, cheaper, and with far broader appeal.
I would make the claim that this is happening organically. My friend’s son is a Freshman at college (big state college) and he says that after the first week or so only about 15% of the kids bother showing up for class. The kids can get the lecture notes, or the video or the audio or whatever online. I don’t know how many do this or how carefully they study (probably not very because he also says a lot of kids are failing in some of his classes) but just to point out that class attendance is already very low.
I am working on my MBA online. It is just as difficult if not more than traditional school. I’m 40, don’t want to quit my job, and the parking sucks at FSU. Been there done that.
The educational system has been infested by the Postmodernism and Progressive thinking of Marx for decades. William F. Buckley wrote about it in 1951 in his book ‘God and Man at Yale’....He wrote about the textbooks that only allowed collectivist economics and atheism to be championed and vigorously promoted—even in the comparative “religion” classes, and which seduced many of the susceptible students, who were weaned on cultural Marxism in their public elementary schools—into a moral relativism.
My wife is a teacher for online classes. She holds three M.A.s (working on a 4th) and a Ph.d. She teaches for two schools. One a community college (3 classes) and one an online University (3 classes). The students love the fact that they don’t have to attend even the community college. I can attest to the fact that the actual learning is equal to, and sometimes exceeds that received from a traditional face-to-face setting. The requirements for being an online teacher, at least in her case, were very strenuous and highly competitive. The quality of education the students are receiving in both institutions is on par with any brick and mortar plant.
Good for you. Glad to hear that another in their 40's jumped into post-grad schooling online.
just as difficult if not more than traditional school
I completed my MS in Information Systems last September - and all my courses were online. I did have a few courses that required me to take proctored final exams - a service my local library provided for me. None of my MS courses were easy and some were very difficult and required much time and effort to complete.
Whew! I'm glad to have my diploma gathering dust on the shelf.
That first school year should weed out many who don't really want to be there or who have the wrong(?) idea about study.
But your point is made. Things are changing and should change.
Congrats to you!! It definately takes discipline. I have a bunch of IT folks in my current course- Organizational Behavior. Plus, my “semesters are only 8 weeks long..
Gee, I was reading a letter in our editorial section today from a man who discussed how teachers feel that parents don’t support the schools verus parents who don’t think they’re listened to by school administrators. His answer: cyberschooling.
In my mind the jury is still out - all this “distance learning” in the right hands can be a powerful tool - but the other side of the coin is that it provides a convenient figleaf for true slackers who can say they studied the material “on their own” nudge nudge. My hunch is that there’s more slackers than there are dedicated scholars - especially when you throw in grade inflation, lowered expectations and the myriad of distractions available on college campii these days. I’d be happy to be proved wrong though.
bflr
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