IGX

Come the Revolution
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.

“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”

Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. The costs of getting a college degree have been rising faster than those of health care, so the need to provide low-cost, quality higher education is more acute than ever. At the same time, in a knowledge economy, getting a higher-education degree is more vital than ever. And thanks to the spread of high-speed wireless technology, high-speed Internet, smartphones, Facebook, the cloud and tablet computers, the world has gone from connected to hyperconnected in just seven years. Finally, a generation that has grown up on these technologies is increasingly comfortable learning and interacting with professors through online platforms.

The combination of all these factors gave birth to Coursera.org, which launched on April 18, with the backing of Silicon Valley venture funds, as my colleague John Markoff first reported.
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“The universities produce and own the content, and we are the platform that hosts and streams it,” explained Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor who founded Coursera with Ng after seeing tens of thousands of students following their free Stanford lectures online. “We will also be working with employers to connect students — only with their consent — with job opportunities that are appropriate to their newly acquired skills. So, for instance, a biomedical company looking for someone with programming and computational biology skills might ask us for students who did well in our courses on cloud computing and genomics. It is great for employers and employees — and it enables someone with a less traditional education to get the credentials to open up these opportunities.”
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These top-quality learning platforms could enable budget-strained community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms. That is, download the world’s best lecturers on any subject and let their own professors concentrate on working face-to-face with students. Says Koller: “It will allow people who lack access to world-class learning — because of financial, geographic or time constraints — to have an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families.”

When you consider how many problems around the world are attributable to the lack of education, that is very good news. Let the revolution begin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/opini ... slfriedman

Turdacious wrote:Sounds nice, but if Freidman is pushing it, it's unlikely if it actually works as advertised.

Come the Revolution
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

bigpeach wrote:Has the value risen faster than the cost?

Pinky wrote:

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

No, it hasn't. The returns to graduating with a C average in English lit might have fallen, but the average returns to a college degree has risen over the past few decades. Returns to education are the main driver of increasing inequality since the 1980s.

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

No, it hasn't. The returns to graduating with a C average in English lit might have fallen, but the average returns to a college degree has risen over the past few decades. Returns to education are the main driver of increasing inequality since the 1980s.

Is it that the returns of a college degree have risen in real terms, or is it that the returns of a college degree relative to a high school diploma have risen?

Pinky wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

No, it hasn't. The returns to graduating with a C average in English lit might have fallen, but the average returns to a college degree has risen over the past few decades. Returns to education are the main driver of increasing inequality since the 1980s.

Is it that the returns of a college degree have risen in real terms, or is it that the returns of a college degree relative to a high school diploma have risen?

It's relative returns.

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:

bigpeach wrote:The value of a degree has been dropping for decades, so the price should as well.

No, it hasn't. The returns to graduating with a C average in English lit might have fallen, but the average returns to a college degree has risen over the past few decades. Returns to education are the main driver of increasing inequality since the 1980s.

Is it that the returns of a college degree have risen in real terms, or is it that the returns of a college degree relative to a high school diploma have risen?

It's relative returns.

So colleges have raised tuition over a period when the real returns of an education are not rising.?

dead man walking wrote:what you study is less significant than how you study and the habits of mind and character you develop.

Turdacious wrote:http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/se ... 90174.html