Online education, with mostly standard curriculum has the potential of freeing students and parents from busing or transporting to and from school (saving tremendous amount of time, gas money and the "environment" by significantly reducing traffic congestion and pollution - it can be sold as the "green solution" to the education problems), bullying, social peer pressure, schoolbooks printing, dramatic reductions in spending on "bigger/smaller classrooms" and many school buildings, as well as reduction in numbers of "educators" - teachers and bureaucrats - that would become unnecessary and/or redundant.
Will be fought tooth and nail by well-fed with government money "education" establishment, but eventually it will be done... first, in some more truly progressive (not phoney "progressives"/"liberal"/"Democratic") states, and then pretty much demanded everywhere.
Whether this will save people money and/or taxes will depend on the states and/or school districts (who don't usually have the incentive to "save" Other People's Money) but the tidal wave of Internet transformation will be felt in the public education, just like it's been felt in the private sector.
Also of interest, on the same subject is recent article by Steve Klinsky (founder and CEO of Mountain Capital, active in education reform since 1993):
Computerizing the Campus | The Virtual Classroom - B (sub), by Steve Klinsky, 2012 June 16
Institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard are justified in maintaining this distinction. They are already accomplishing a social good by providing free online courses and should not also be asked to dilute or confuse the value of their traditional degree. But it's also true that the best unaccredited online courses may be higher in quality and more rigorous than a physical course at a lower-quality college that is accredited. Ideally, all courses' rigor and all students' individual achievement should be measured to reflect this reality. ..... < snip >
..... Under such an approach, students could succeed through individual initiative, rather than reliance on financial aid and student debt. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... Accreditation means that a course credit can be transferred to other institutions and that graduate schools will recognize applicants' online credits. Right now, edX will give a certificate of mastery from edX, not an accredited degree from Harvard or MIT. Similarly, a student at Stanford's open Artificial Intelligence course earned a "statement of accomplishment," not an accredited course credit from Stanford University.
I’ve watched a bunch of MIT courses online. It’s cool to get a different point of view from my current professors.
Not a bad idea. I had a few classes in college that I had to teach myself out of the textbook, the teacher was so bad (usually couldn’t speak enough English to order a Big Mac). This would, of course, twist the educrats’ heads in their sockets. The student could truly be an education consumer instead of being forced to put up with the local deadwood.
I learned only last night that MIT has been putting some content of courses online all the way back to 2002.
www.khanacademy.com
Great instructional videos and free. If you have a kid that is having trouble with math concepts...this is the place...
The traditional model for education served Western civilization well for 1500 years, but it has been rendered obsolete by technology. We need to accept that and embrace a new, decentralized educational model, and hopefully to do it faster and more completely than other countries.
It is a coincidence, but our current economic downturn actually will help bring this new educational model about. Many families have a parent out of work, but just because they don't have a job doesn't mean they can't be valuable to society and their families. What we should be advocating is a homeschooling renaissance, to cut the regulations hindering greater homeschooling and have these parents teach their children. Many countries severely restrict homeschooling, but if we embrace it far more than we have currently, we can end up with the most educated work force in the world.
As for edX, it currently does not offer a degree, but a "certificate of mastery" or some such thing. Right now it is not worth a degree, but that will be solved by the marketplace. When an employer equates a certificate of mastery as being equal to a paid degree, then the upper level of education will be fundamentally changed. And no band aids to prop up student loans or paying teachers will stop the sea change.
bflr
Hillsdale had an online course about the Constitution. That was neat.
bookmark
It would be great if there were some sort of umbrella schools that would cover homeschooling for college, and award degrees, like there are that award high school diplomas. Then folks could sign up with the umbrella school, take free courses online, have someone at the school look over the work, then award credits toward a degree. I don't see why this couldn't work for degrees in the Humanities, Mathematics, Foreign Languages, Social Sciences, and just about any degree that doesn't require serious laboratory work.
Wouldn't it be great if anyone could be an auto-didact, and be rewarded for their hard work, even if it takes them 6-10 years to finish the work. That way, they wouldn't need to quit the job that allows them to pay the bills, and they wouldn't have to get student loans, to boot.
I have gone through several I Tunes university courses.
The only thing missing is certifiable examinations to prove to another that the material has been mastered.
My son recently took the first part of his CPA exam at a testing center.
So?....if a Certified Public Accountant exam can be administered at a testing center, why not algebra, or high school history, or second grade spelling, third grade reading, or fourth grade geography?
If testing centers were willing to accept advertising perhaps even the testing to could be free to the student.
Why isn't every government school K-12 class on the Internet from kindergarten through AP calculus? Hm? What the big cost in videoing a teacher? And...It should be entirely tuition-free to all the citizens of the state regardless of age. Hey! The citizens paid for it. What's the BIG secret?
ping
Here come the Indian professors (more of ‘em, anyway). Sorry, maybe I’m a Luddite, but I hate this. It looks like another steaming pile of Global Society about to be rammed down our throats.
Leave it to these guys to mess up a trend .....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/14/goldman-sachs-for-profit-college_n_997409.html
I had a good friend once that graduated from MIT....had the BEST schooling money could buy...we talked about waveguides and stuff...he said “I know the math and how waves propagate down the waveguide, but I have no effing idea how that wave go in there to start with - they didn’t teach us that.”
I showed him. Apparently MIT LL and crew, ‘so-called’ inventors of American Radar, didn’t bother to take care of the little things.. for all you out there, the first radar was in England, and the first Microwave radar was made possible by a British Klystron....so much for LL’s RadLab series.