Consider OpenCourseWare credit: A portal to search for courses from many of these OpenCourseWare providers is:
http://www.ocwconsortium.org Many universities provide free education online to much of their syllabus. Few examples: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm, http://see.stanford.edu/, http://ocw.nd.edu/ Ability to test out at low cost if candidate qualifies as eligible; or unable to attend college , private or otherwise via disability, financial, family, or many other situations where Americans would not be able to afford or schedule traditional college. Incentive for students (obvious and many) Incentive for teachers: - Many professors simply would like to teach as many people as possible. This is evident due to the amount of OpenCourseWare available already today. Also, Mr. Lessig, Aaron's Swartz' legal advisor and friend mentioned as much in an interview with Chris Hayes. - JSTOR: the archive in Mr. Swartz's case, recently opened their archive with little to no objection from professors or universities. http://about.jstor.org/individuals - Any profit earned by the "low cost", listed above, would be paid 100% to the producers of the content aka Teachers. Cost mitigation: - Large files, such as lecture videos should embrace tried and true peer to peer tech like bittorrent protocols. - Regardless of controversy surrounding the protocol, it is an effective way to host very large files for very little bandwidth cost, as well as in many cases serve your students faster. - Universities/Corporations can host bittorrent "trackers" that do not allow submissions from anyone but authorized users or providers. - That way all files, and intellectual property responsibilities would be attached to the owners of the files. And moderators would only have to filter those authorized providers. Problems: - Some universities, and many community colleges profit will be affected negatively by such a project. But those universities have programs like the NCAA, and are/will be an aspiration for most of our successful students regardless of this alternative option. Those students, physically attending will have the advantage of hands-on labs in facilities they otherwise would never have access to as an online student. Other Points: - There many commercials on tv for paid college programs where students can earn degrees. These programs can't be better than our Finest Universities? - Online may be argued as inferior, I wouldn't know, I would be interested in a hearing and study regarding efficacy of this type of program. But if this type of program would be regarded as inferior, degrees could reflect the type of education that the (now professionals) have received. But I don't see how this would not be considered discrimination as long as all students had to take the same tests, in the same type of environment. For example, a student studies a topic online, when they and the software feel the student is proficient, that student would then schedule a test at a local testing center. (Corp? College?) What is needed: - Long Term - Bandwidth...it's that simple. If the government would provide funds for cloud services where needed, the benefits, considering US youth and society at large, would be exponential over the generations. The Beauty of cloud services is that if your system is not being used by the public, it costs Nothing. Code maintenance should be eligible for certain grants based on successful results, but at the same time, all should embrace the open source community (I.E. support and upgrades for a possibly standard CMS to be shared among the different providers). These costs can run from minimal all the way to free, it just depends on how much traffic these programs receive. If they're deployed in a clever way, each university could be mirrored by all the rest. In the case that school A is just about at it's max bandwidth limit; that would trigger a script to search the other mirrors for available bandwidth. It's possible, if done correctly, that a program like this could be inexpensive Even if popular. Notes on Obama's speech on Student loans this morning 5/31/2013: Average student loan: $26,000 Obama's student loans cost more than his mortgage. While he was still paying student loans, he was saving for children's college, yet financially better off than most Americans. “Every young person should be able to access higher education” is an aspiration of our President since he was a Senator, running for the White House.
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