Google Fellow Wants to Offer Online Graduate Degrees for $100
June 7th, 2012In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about how great all of it is.
—Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
Here’s a small sample of recent related posts:
Foxconn: Students Told to Man Production Lines If They Want to Graduate
The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
Robert Reich to New College Graduates: ‘You’re F*cked’
Canon: Fully Automated Digital Camera Manufacturing by 2015
Increasing Use of Robots in China’s Factories
All Hail the Robotic Farmers and Pilots of the Future
IBM’s Internal Plan to Grow Earnings-Per-Share to $20 by 2015: Fire Most U.S. Employees
Via: Forbes:
Thrun has found a fresh challenge that excites him even more: fixing higher education. Conventional university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ineffective to survive for long, he contends. He wants to foment a teaching revolution in which the world’s best instructors conduct highly interactive online classes that let them reach 100,000 students simultaneously and globally.
Financiers at Charles River Ventures have already pumped $5 million into Thrun’s online-ed startup, Udacity. “I like to back people who have disruptive personalities,” explains CRV partner George Zachary. “They create disruptive solutions.”
Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”
Thinking of a “highly-interactive” online course with 100,000 students remined me somehow of this passage from a recent Reuters peice on privatized education:
“Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/01/us-education-vouchers-idUSL1E8H10AG20120601