"Online university for the masses!" by Margaret Wente at The Globe & Mail

[applegrove]

Online university for the masses!

by Margaret Wente at The Globe & Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/online-university-for-the-masses/article4426073/?utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=The%20Globe%20and%20Mail&utm_type=text&utm_content=TheGlobeandMail&utm_campaign=96388499

"SNIP..................................

How would you like to take the best courses from the best professors at the best universities in the world – basically for free? How would you like to interact online with fellow students, have your online questions answered within minutes and take quizzes for real marks?

You can now. And the revolution is just beginning. This week, the University of Toronto joined Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and a dozen other major universities offering free online courses to anyone anywhere in the world with a computer. They are partners in Coursera, an online venture launched a year ago by two Stanford University computer scientists. No pesky entrance exams or prerequisites required. No $40,000 tuition, either.

Coursera is just one of many new initiatives in online learning. Harvard and MIT are pouring millions into edX, a joint venture that will offer their own online courses. This spring, MIT launched an experimental online version of a course called Circuits and Electronics. Almost 155,000 people signed up. More than 7,000 passed.

Online education has been around in various forms for a while, but the response to these courses has been massive. Last fall, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun launched an online version of his graduate-level course on artificial intelligence. He thought 500 people might sign up. He drew 137,000, two-thirds of them from outside the United States. The course (which requires a grasp of Bayesian probability) is so hard that only a few thousand people stuck it out and passed. But Prof. Thrun was so struck by the demand that he quit his job and launched his own online company, Udacity. He predicts that in 50 years, only 10 institutions in the world will be offering higher education.

.......................................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Maybe this is why the GOP don't care that universities are becoming so expensive. They figure only

the elite will go to an actual university in the years to come. More of their elitist dystopia.

[HiPointDem]

4. +1. anyone else who wants to go to uni or college will pay what the market can bear -- no

more subsidies for the 99%.

everytime they put the screws to us, the PR flaks come out billing it as some populist "revolution". this article is bullshit propaganda.

[Riftaxe]

6. It would be interesting to see if Universities would be

nearly as expensive if they focused on academics, instead of becoming a substitute for amusement parks with all of the coffee shops, pizza parlors and other frivolous amenities that constitute University campuses these days.

[1monster]

2. This is great, but where's the url to sign up?

[DevonRex]

5. Just google coursera. I did it. Nt

[HiPointDem]

3. He quit his job and launched a FOR-PROFIT COMPANY. This is not the story of on-line education

'for the masses', it's the story of the destruction of public universities and public education.