interesting mail on this topic as we have a heated discussion elsewhere on the merits (no pun intended) of reservations. so, you wanna get a degree from google university online?
this is not so far-fetched. mcdonald's has hamburger university, which is quite good at teaching the precisely defined cookie-cutter operations that make fast-food such a success story.
the university of phoenix, which is a virtual university, is the largest university in the US and has huge numbers of students. it's not fully electronic, though.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anil
Google University on YouTube at Starbucks in Barnes and Nobles
http://stoppseudoscience.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-university-on-youtube-at.html
4 comments:
Rajeev,
MIT has a great Opencourseware program too. Look at this page
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
You cannot earn a degree from MIT this way, but something like this is ideal for the 'gifted amateur' category, who wises to learn more formally outside his/her chosen discipline.
Internet based learning is a great potential leveller in primary education in India - where the issue at hand is access - or lack of it - non-availability (i.e. absenteeism) or incompetence of government teachers in schools. In higher education, If they can replicate lab or research facilities (private investment) and make all IIT lectures available online, it would narrow the resource gap between an IIT-genius and someone doing their engineering in a private college in Maharashtra.
The biggest loosers in this are those studying the humanities as scientific and engineering, which requires laboratories and experimentation will not work in a virtual world. Given what you think of the JNU MA-History crowd, that is not all together a bad thing :-)
ghostwriter, yet, internet learning can be powerful.
i have used some of the open courseware from the MIT Sloan School. the content is good, but it's not as good as one might think it would be. you relly have to be there -- the instructor actually does a lot for the learning. and the OCW is basically the slides and the course content.
"it's not fully electronic, though."
What do you mean by this- just curious? I have friends studying there and the online courses are fully online - no physical presence required.
I'm assuming he's referring to the fact that only half of University of Phoenix's population attends fully online. The other half are either in the full classroom environment at one of the campus locations or in a hybrid environment (first and last nights of class on a physical campus, the intervening weeks online).
Post a Comment