Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal. But how to make education equal? Instead of setting up quotas maybe we should simply switch teachers. Let the teachers rotate among schools so that every kid gets a random selection of teachers and every teacher gets a random selection of students. At the same time, should also try to minimize the number of private schools, either through le…
>I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal. It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your social background. I absolutely can't understand why would any country require its citizens to pay for education in state-funded schools and universities. Educated people are the best and the biggest national asset. Anything that creates a barrier (monetary or n…
The universities were at the bleeding edge of new networked IT solutions even into the 1980s. As low-cost portable devices became available that could display high-quality real-time video on demand, it was clear that such a solution would soon be faster, cheaper and better than passively sitting in a lecture hall. And little, if anything, happened on the University side for years and years.
The occasional academician might try something, but it was spotty at best. A few years ago, there were professors who were still banning laptops from lecture rooms. Faculty Senates stuck their collective heads in the sand. They couldn’t figure out a business case where they could make money in a video future, so they ignored it. Meanwhile, students got a slower, worse, more expensive education than they could and should have.
We should be in the third or fourth generation of online university courses by now. Professionally produced and vetted lectures, hyperlinks to past and supplemental materials synced to video, diverse actors presenting material that engage various population of students more effectively. Objective measures of student learning improvements to support process quality improvements. From service courses through grad seminars. The best courses offered to not one university, but all universities (potentially). Simulators of lab equipments so students get training on the newest equipment, and aren’t learning outdated inefficient lab practices. Online networking with mentors in the real world. Effective controls on cheating on exams. These all should be mature, fully deployed technologies by now. And they aren’t.
That is the mortal sin of Higher Education in the 21st Century. They just didn’t care. I consider a lot of the political turmoil on campuses as just a smokescreen by academic leadership to distract the digital native students from asking the inconvenient questions of why is education so…clunky.
Rant mode off.