Comments on: 2020 – Varsity’s end?

By: Tony

Tony — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:57:16 +0000

I cannot speak for experiences in the States, but I do work in HE in the UK. All I can say, is ‘bring it on’, as I am convinced that the current state of University teaching (at least in the UK) is next to useless. Some thoughts;

Why do universities have three terms?
Why do people have to start a degree programme at just one time in the year?
Why are so many courses based on the prejudices of individual lecturers rather than what may help the student get a job?
The government here has its fingers so completely entwined with the education systems that it is totally politicized
Students exit with (next to worthless) degrees and with huge debts
HE is in need of a major shakeup – it is *not* addressing the needs of the students, and I look forward to the first few universities going out of business.

By: Ruth Howard

Ruth Howard — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 08:36:27 +0000

Yes! Wiley’s totally onto it. If you’re a new teacher like myself,learning to blog and to use social media tools you can really see it. I think possibly because I’m not entrenched in education yet it may be easier for me to observe?

I’m excited by the understanding that low cost user friendly course ware will soon become freely available so that anyone can construct a course with online delivery. The tribe will choose whom is worth learning from. Word of mouth will prevail. This inherently points to the idea that whomever has the most students rises to the top as a credible source. Its particularly exciting because its unpredictable, authentic, transparent and I’m hoping democratises learning. What interests me about the current crisis in education is the natural shift to learning and human centred rather than didactic mechanistic models. This new model of online learning encourages independent learners who are self directed collaborating globally on real issues, we need the solutions! I also love the idea of opening up the classroom to different age groups learning together.

I am cautious in this collaborative domain however about centralised control of the web, which could really undermine this learning revolution.

By: SMD

SMD — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:30:00 +0000

I have to call B.S. on this. I don’t think one can at all say that true universities aren’t offering something that can’t be had elsewhere. While all that information is available, it’s not provided in a forum where people who have spent much of their lives studying the material can chime in and actually provide perspectives and clarification. The Internet is great for information, but the Internet is also a lovely place for all the idiots and uneducated morons to roam around babbling about stuff they think they know when they clearly don’t–YouTube being a prime example of what the Internet has done for the illiterate. The level of misinformation provided outside of the university environment is astronomical. While misinformation certainly occurs within the university, it’s not at the same scale and there are other perspectives often offered.

I’m not saying Unis are perfect, but I think this guy’s assessment should be taken with a grain of salt, particularly because of where he is teaching. I wouldn’t trust the LDS with anything considering their recent track record in the states.

But this is based on my experience at a U.S. university. I don’t know what Unis are like elsewhere in the world (you mentioned there are too many graduates in the UK and that there might be a shift to more apprenticing, which would still be drastically different from what is being proposed).

And I hate to have to be the guy to say this, but the University of Phoenix is to real U.S. universities what vanity presses are to traditional publishing. That’s the truth. Places like U of Phoenix have turned something that should be more than a commodity into something you can just buy whenever you want to. There are no standards beyond passing. Anybody can do it, and that’s the problem I have, because it offers a false hope for people who think “hey, if I go here I’ll get a good education and end up with an amazing awesome job,” when in reality, that’s far from the truth. ITT Tech, for example, has a terrible track record with placing people in decent paying jobs in the U.S., even though their commercials paint a very rosy picture. I worked with a lot of ITT Tech graduates and they were making only a few dollars over minimum wage, even though they had gone to two years of expensive “tech” school. None of them were working in fields they had trained for and none of them could get jobs that would pay them more, because the degree was essentially worthless.

This is my rant on commodity education for the day…