OT - Online Classes/Degrees
- Thread starter DaddyChoc
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Er... like traditional college graduation rates & debt are so great today?
"...Just 56 percent of college students complete four-year degrees within six years, according to a 2011 Harvard Graduate School of Education study. Among the 18 developed countries in the OECD, the U.S. was dead last for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it -- even behind Slovakia..."
... The average debt of college seniors who graduated in 2010 with student loans rose 5% from a year earlier to $25,250, according to a report.... (& it's going up, not down methinks...
)Just as cable-TV & the Web has changed shopping, books, news, music, sports & movie delivery, it's gonna change education. It's only surprising it's been moving so slowly (to even more digital platforms). MIT & Harvard are just a few of the colleges that have already put lots of their course online (FOR FREE).
Harvard & MIT offer free online classes
One thing that will (eventually) be worked out is how the interaction process works. But for people who say traditional classes are more interactive... I don't necessarily agree. I had lectures with hundreds of students. And the ones with small classes (20-ish) were most often 99%+ lecture.
The basis (heart) of most courses I EVER had was... READING (not Q&A). And I don't see a huge (qualitative) difference in reading in your room, study hall or library... or on your computer. The person I saw on a recent Boston TV interview (fr MIT & Harvard) thought that interactive platforms (for online classes) would become better as they are refined & improved. And they have an advantage in that course proctors can follow a student's progress much more closely online than in a traditional setting.
But the cost of college is the reason online courses is the future. If food & gas had risen as much as tuition has (1025% since 1980)... milk would be $22/gal, and gas $13/gal.
With most things today, technology has given us better quality for lower prices. With education we're getting lower quality for higher prices. (most colleges have remedial classes for freshman). Business has generally become more (cost) efficient, yet the education business has gone the opposite direction. The better question is why aren't more people outraged & doing something? College Costs Rise 1025.4% Since 1980
John Stossel recently did an hour show on how colleges waste money on extravagant buildings & manpower inefficiencies. Why? Because they can... (enough) people still pay... and the loan system has evolved into a racket that the Mob would love to have a piece of. Most of the money is not going to better curriculum's or better education (just the opposite... students are coming out stupider). And lib-arts (originally the core of a "college education") has devolved into a (PC) mess. Few mandatory course that have any real value, like in the past (philosophy, history, literature, civics, science). But plenty of obscure or generally worthless studies (gender studies et al).
John Stossel - Is College A Rip-off?
And the loan system is another (gov induced/helped) financial bubble waiting to crash. This is JUST the time for markets to help solve this crisis... (1) kids choosing local community colleges over expensive private schools (with real teachers instead of professors more interested in publishing & tenure at big-name schools)... (2) kids choosing online education.... and (3) kids choosing occupations that require skills & certification rather than (quite often worthless) college courses: Plumbing, HVAC, Auto Mechanic, CPA, Computer Certification, etc. Those (valuable) skills all have certification as a requirement. The same way a lawyer, nurse, doctor, teacher, etc has to pass a licensing test to prove they are knowledgeable enough to do certain jobs.
For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time :
"...But that's irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.
No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.
But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.
An educational world based on certification tests would be a better place in many ways, but the overarching benefit is that the line between college and noncollege competencies would be blurred. Hardly any jobs would still have the BA as a requirement for a shot at being hired. Opportunities would be wider and fairer, and the stigma of not having a BA would diminish.
Most important in an increasingly class-riven America: The demonstration of competency in business administration or European history would, appropriately, take on similarities to the demonstration of competency in cooking or welding. Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.
Here's the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence -- treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone -- is one way to help us to recognize that common bond."
Down with the Four-Year College Degree! by Charles Murray :
"...Four years makes sense for students who are trying to get a liberal education and therefore need to take a few dozen courses in philosophy, religion, classical and modern literature, the fine arts, classical and modern history (including the history of science), plus acquire fluency in a foreign language and take basic survey courses in the social sciences. The percentage of college students who want to do that is what? Ten percent? Probably that is too optimistic. Whatever the exact figure, it is a tiny minority.
For everyone else, four years is ridiculous. Assuming a semester system with four courses per semester, four years of class work means thirty-two semester-long courses. The occupations that require thirty-two courses are exceedingly rare. In fact, I can't think of a single example. Even medical school and Ph.D.s don't require four years of course work. For the student who wants to become a good hotel manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator, farmer, high-school teacher, social worker, journalist, optometrist, interior designer, or football coach, the classes needed for the academic basis for competence take a year or two. Actually becoming good at one's job usually takes longer than that, but competence in any profession is mostly acquired on the job. The two-year community college and online courses offer more flexible options than the four-year college for tailoring academic course work to the real needs of students."
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