Top US universities put their reputations online

BBC ^ | June 20, 2012 | Sean Coughlan

[CutePuppy]

This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education.

Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global audience.

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionising education around the world".

Sounding like a piece of secret military hardware, edX will provide online interactive courses which can be studied by anyone, anywhere, with no admission requirements and, at least at present, without charge.

With roots in Silicon Valley, Stanford academics have set up another online platform, Coursera, which will provide courses from Stanford and Princeton and other leading US institutions.

The first president of edX is Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the pioneers of the MITx online prototype.

He puts forward a statistic that encapsulates the game-changing potential.

The first online course from MITx earlier this year had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university.

In fact, it isn't far from the total of all the students who have ever been there since the 19th Century.

'Tipping point'

The internet provides an unparalleled capacity to expand the reach - but it also raises far-reaching and thorny questions for the traditional model of a university.

.....

[Gaffer]

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.

[Trod Upon]

Because education is a huge part of enculturation, I have serious misgivings about the ability of foreign institutions to produce what for lack of a better term I will call "finished Americans." We have enough difficulty with the leftists in our domestic institutions, and I fail to see how predominately 3rd world professors (as you must know they will be, labor costs being what they are) will be less hostile to Western civilization than their US counterparts. So I question the value of what we will ultimately be getting beyond the educational equivalent of cheap, commoditized Chinese crap at Walmart and empty US industrial sites. Maybe it will work differently this time, but I am not hopeful.

It also sounds like a great way to slowly offshore the last vestiges of US research institutions (hey, MIT probably would be cheaper at Chennai) while producing a new generation of people at home who view themselves increasingly as "Citizens of the world." And they are of no use; I have never met a self-described COTW that was not an absolutely flaming internationalist lefty. The market is great for setting the value of fungible commodity items, but I don't view an education as such. Mere technical training, sure, but education is broader, and I think properly imparted it serves to reinforce a sense of nationhood in our young adults.

Sure more choices are better, right up until they lead to fewer choices, as has happened with the decimation of whole swaths of American industry. I suppose some people don't mind seeing highway bridges and national monuments being imported, but it smells of civilizational gangrene to me. Furthermore, just because something is "market driven" doesn't mean it is beneficial or even benign. The market drove captive human labor in America (still does in some places). True, it may eventually have ended the practice when slave maintenance grew expensive enough by comparison to other means, but still. I guess we just fundamentally disagree.

[wintertime]

US research institutions
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Once upon a time the U.S. did not have government funded research institutions. Gee! How did we ever manage? ( sarc.)

[Vince Ferrer]

I am now a full-time student at a private artist's atelier ( rigorous art training).

Congratulations to you, I would like to do that some day as well. I am a rather serious amature myself.