Would it be possible to have an open source university? That is an on line institution that provided an education with the necessarily accepted certificates at a free or very nominal charge.
There are already sources of free information, both on and off line. What’s harder to get for free is feedback and evaluation. To figure out whether you’ve acquired the knowledge, understanding, abilities, and so forth that a degree is supposed to certify requires human experts to put in more time and effort than anyone’s likely to do for free on any regular basis.
You can already get an MIT education from your computer with their excellent OpenCourseWare. Of course, you can get the education but no degree.
Then who pays for the teachers who set up the courses, and grade the exams, and do all the work that make a real college degree worth something? Not to mention all the other associated costs.
The certification could not be handled by allowing one to take the standard test given by standing institutions for the chosen course, for a nominal fee? Could not cyber structure such as “Wikipedia” be aranged for guidance. Requiring some committment yes but it seem DoAble.
Well when you get rid of all of a University’s physical infrastructure, acceptance overhead and spread the cost over tens of thousands of students instead of a couple hundred its not hard to see why the price would drastically go down. Compared to a physical building hosting a bunch of lectures on a server is nothing. I think you could easily provide 90% of the education that a real life lecture provides at a few percent of the cost.
The only problem I see is how you are going to ensure the legitimacy of a test you give to 10s of thousands of people across the country. With modern communications it would be ridiculously easy to cheat. Anyone know how current online courses handle this?
Not sure I understand any of this. What standard tests exist for courses? Aren’t they devised anew each time by the teacher? And if you’re using an existing institution’s course they’re not giving it away for free.
Wikipedia may be a repository of facts but it lacks huge amounts of important facts about almost everything, the facts in many areas are subject to interpretation that depends on one’s worldview and philosophy, and even if the facts are accurate, the context for the facts and the placing of the context into a coherent narrative - i.e. teaching - is totally lacking. True learning is far more than memorizing facts.
You haven’t put forward a model of who does this and why, and who would take it seriously if they tried. Remember, Wikipedia is not yet taken seriously by many people outside of its cult.
Universities and other institutions of higher learning operate on the basis of a market model; in exchange for tuition and subsidy they offer you knowledge and accreditation, the latter being the more crucial part of the bargin, as far as the employment world is concerned. You could, of course, go to the library and read up on any topic you choose, and with the advent of the Internet, finding a mentor (in the guise of someone willing to answer your questions) is very easy–perhaps too easy, as many people accept an answer without having to go through the struggle to figure it out for themselves.
Accreditation could be validated by taking and passing standardized but randomized tests, similar to MSCE and RHCE certs. You’d still have the problem that someone else could take the test for the student, but then, that often happens at brick-n-mortar schools in large lecture hall classes. Many classes at MIT and Caltech regularly give the students take home tests, with the understanding that the Honor System will be upheld. (I’ve read that in some classes it is even overtly permitted for students to collaborate, so long as the actual work on the exam is their own.) You’d have to convince the appropriate accreditation boards to offer you sponsorship (difficult); you’d also have to convince the business world and potential students that your program is valuable and graduates learned (very difficult).
Online schools seem to be feeding off of the corporate-driven need for degrees and accreditation, even if the actual content is little to nil. Let’s face it, most corporate jobs, even many technical ones, could be done by a high school graduate with a modest amount of on-the-job training. It’s an industry pumped up by artificial demand to cope with the inability of conventional schools to handle increased throughput.
One thing no online school (either for-profit or “open source”) can offer is laboratory facilities. Frankly, I don’t want to be attended by an RN who learned how to draw blood via a Java applet. Online schools are fine for low-content MBAs or software accreditation, but they aren’t going to replace medical, science, or engineering schools. They also can’t replicate the exposure and experience a good liberal arts education should offer. While good profs may be few and far between, when you get one who really connects and delivers the material–not just a superficial reading but brings together what you’ve learned in other classes to make a cohesive whole–then you’ve really gotten what higher education is supposed to offer; a more integrated understanding and broader horizons than study of any isolated field provides.
If education is what you seek, you needn’t shell out the bucks for the sheepskin; there are plenty of well-educated people who’ve spent few hours in a classroom but many in the library or around experts taking in all of the “open source” education there is to be had, and contrarywise, there are many PhDs who aren’t qualified to speak authoritatively in their own field, much less upon any other. If credit is what you’re looking for, you need to have a name with some recognition, hopefully (but not assuredly) backed up by a teaching staff that is able to convey some amount of learning and wisdom through the alcohol-blurred and drug-fueled haze that permeates the typical collegiate experience.
Stranger
Bingo. Getting a degree from a “real” college or university generally involves lots of writing (essays, critical analyses, research papers, etc.), working problems (in math & science) and possibly writing proofs, doing hands-on lab work (and reporting on it), perhaps making speeches or presentations. All of these and more are important both for learning and for demonstrating to the proper authorities that you have learned. It’s not something you can cover with just a series of standardized, computer-scorable tests.
Interesting responces and thank you all. I do think that as in any situtation one gets out of a program what they want, that is a quick and easy piece of paper or all of the quality that can be had out of the program. Nursing needs hands on most liberal arts do not so I still think that there is an opportunity here.
Tell ya what. You promise me a time load and salary commensurate with other universities I can expect to get hired at and I’ll come on board. That’s $45-50K for 8-10 hours per week, leaving time for me to do my own independent research. I can choose to live near other institutions for interaction with other mathematicians. I’d also expect increased pay and tenure-track opportunities as time goes by.