Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). I promoted the idea that most of what is done in classrooms after 13 should be replaced by online programmes in a project in the 1980s. The technology lagged the idea then - and the idea wasn't much more than that of students reading-up before lectures and doing hard problem solving in tutorials. We were developing interactive role-play videos at the time. It was very expensive and the technology not up to speed. A CD burner cost around $30K in today's money.
In fact, mainstream university education outside science went backwards to more and more formal teaching and death by Powerpoint - it was what lecturers were trained to do. The MOOC model is now getting stronger and Bill Gates is investing through bis trust. One project I'd love to have a go at is to produce video games that teach basics from cell biology to business. Cell biology lends itself to science fiction. Whilst cells are tiny the scale of what goes on in them and their structures are 'Star Wars'. One could devise a game based in virus attack and the 'arms wars' of co-evolution. My business game would probably be based on Al Capone. You can write the things in hypertext with lots of links to knowledge. The games could probably be written to allow simulated research too - we have virtual reality labs to teach engineering. We could probably write community project simulations too - about, say, setting up community-based food supply and property building. The fundamental idea in this is the embodiment of expert knowledge - much as we have embodied man artisanal skills in machines. The models of education we do have rely on academic forms of learning only few are much good at. In higher education e have seen the expansion of this to a massive debt cost. This from Zerohedge somewhere: Career Education, when it reported its quarterly financial results, shed more light on an industry that had ruthlessly taken advantage of quirks in the American way of funding higher education, and that, even more insidiously, had preyed on gullible prospective students who were desperately trying to better their lives. Then it handed the tab to the taxpayer who couldn’t say no. A perfect scam. And it contributed to a ruinous mountain of student loans [ Next: Bankruptcy for a whole Generation]. In the halcyon days of 2010, Career Education had $2.09 billion in annual revenues. Then a free-fall. By September 30, quarterly revenues hit $333 million. Enrollment was down 23%, in the health education category 41%. An additional 900 people will be laid off, on top of the previously announced 1,300. The company will “gradually” close 23 of its 90 campuses. Red ink is gushing, with no end in sight. The stock has plunged from $70 in June 2004 to today’s 52-week intraday low of $2.60. Career Education is in good company. The largest player in the industry, University of Phoenix, which is owned by Apollo Group, is also getting hammered by scandals and declining revenues. Enrolment has plummeted from over 400,000 students to 328,000. To halt the bleeding, it shuttered 115 locations in 30 states. Corinthian Colleges got hit as well. One of its specialties was the Ability-to-Benefit program, under which students without high school diploma or GED had been receiving student loans and grants to attend classes though they had virtually no chance of graduating. As of July 1, 2012, the government shut off the spigot. Now scrambling to get back on that gravy train, the school is offering free GED preparation programs to high-school dropouts, expecting for “some portion of successful GED completers to enroll” in its institutions. And it’s trying hard to sign up new students to pocket their financial aid: marketing and admission expenses were about 25% of revenues.... “Our mission is to change students’ lives,” the press release said. Corinthian Colleges is selling some campuses and shuttering others, particularly in California where the crackdown has become more aggressive. For a reason: the out-of-money state is trying to reign in the cost of its Cal Grants, a financial aid system that ballooned from $915 million to $1.6 billion in eight years. These schools are facing tighter regulations all around. On the federal level, the Department of Education, for instance, banned incentives paid to admissions reps or recruiters for the number of students they hoodwinked into enrolling. Pressures are rising to get these schools to prioritize student graduation and job placement, rather than just grabbing financial-aid money. But, as the financial results demonstrate, that push blew up their entire business model. In its dazzling manner, the for-profit post-secondary education boom left behind a long trail of wrecked dreams, unfinished or worthless degrees, wasted time, and a huge pile of student loans resting on the shoulders of people who were unable to find jobs in the fields they’d studied and who are now unable to pay back these loans. In the process, these outfits sucked up taxpayer-funded state and federal financial aid of all types and made early investors and executives rich. At their peaks, the stocks were picked up by mutual funds and were thus sneakily stuffed into well-diversified portfolios and 401k’s, as recommended by all of Wall Street. Because somebody has got to buy this stuff on the way down. The situation in the UK - where HE is technically public sector, is little different. I have moved out of undergraduate education to assessing work-based schemes. This is dreadful - but at least my pay doesn't rely on putting young people into £40K of debt. There are young people all over the world in this condition - notably the 'Ant People' of China - even their expanding economy doesn't provide decent jobs for graduates. My own suspicion is education is not a good thing. I'm an educationalist so this doesn't make much sense. They key problem is trying to exploit it through already failing bubsiness models (I'll leave the typo as it sounds right) - and what scares me is that we are hoping for salvation through them. --
