In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford, began teaching a class. Part of it was in person. Part of it was online. The online portion had over 160,000 students. Some of them did better than the students who took the class in person. Out of this single data point, a legend was born. What grew up in the twelve or so months after this even was a sight to behold. Thrun left Stanford to
One of the most interesting things about the pandemic is the questions it raises about the price of education. Can institutions reasonably expect to charge what they normally charge, given that the quality of an online education is substandard compared to student expectations? Let’s start with the quality arguments. There is an argument that the quality of an online experience can match a face-to-face one. And that’s true – provided instructors have the time, money and inclination to build online
Ah, MOOCs. The decade’s most over-hyped higher education fad: indeed, possibly the most ludicrously over-hyped fad the sector has ever seen. About three years ago, I chronicled the decline of MOOCs from the dizzying heights of 2012 onwards. But in the last couple of weeks, there have been a few developments which suggest that the MOOC era may be well and truly dead. First up was the news that Arizona State University was letting its “Global Freshman Academy” wind down. The Global Freshman
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fads? Great big, often stupid, enthusiasms about things that were going to change higher education completely. Seems like we don’t hear about them anymore. Remember MOOCs? They were going create tsunamis of change. Many people said a lot of incredulous things about MOOCS and higher education, maybe none more so than Trent University’s Chancellor, Don Tapscott. (Remember this gem of futurology, about the week “higher education as we know it “ended”? Maybe not as bad
There was a time – six years or so ago now – when people were talking about the death of universities and the rise of MOOCs. (A collection of my previous posts on MOOCs can be found here). Among the many, many things this debate obscured was the fact that education delivered online was almost as old as the internet itself. Online education was mature, not some newfangled idea (in the Silicon Valley version of history, everything not invented in
One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
