But I am nervous about over-hyping this approach. Time and time again, high attrition rates in online learning can be traced back to social isolation. Here’s a long but great article about the pitfalls and expectations of self paced learning by Scott Grey of O’reilly School of Tech: http://blog.oreillyschool.com/…

Among other things, Scott’s article stresses the importance of mentorship and social interaction (learner -learner and facilitator to learner) in online learning environments based on two decades of facilitating online learning classes in comp sci. This is missing from the Khan Academy and Udacity Model. Thats what we’re working on at TechChange with courses like Mobiles for Int’l Development, Tech Tools for Emergency Management, and more. Check us out here: http://techchange.org

I’d love to see more universities and online learning providers find a balance between these one-to many types of self-paced learning opportunities and dynamic social learning environments for delivering online courses. As long as Blackboard is the common denominator I do worry that we wont see much innovation with the latter any time soon.

(quote) “InTech is a world leader in the provision of STM Open Access content, including books and journals. We break down the traditional barriers to becoming published and provide authors with new choices and an equal opportunity to share their ideas and the results of their research with the global scientific community.”

If “this” consists of the lecturer, an RA or two, a couple techies and a business manager, and if I could take three such courses and in each be allowed the normal number of credits given for the course IRL, and the course covers, or even exceeds, what the course normally covers IRL, then (“this” X 3) yields a highly affordable and yet likely highly effective college semester.

So I think he’s covered “this”, and even “all this”. But if “this” meant Stanford campus and body and associates, yeah, that’s going to be a problem.

Do you have any proof for this claim, Felix_Salmon? Any proof whatsoever?

I’m sure there were IPs hitting the course from Afghanistan. Were they the same people who were “in a war zone” and “leaving it for an hour to finish up their homework”? *Probably not*, and it’s a little irresponsible for you to claim as much without substantiation.

There were two CS classes that collaborated with the CS Department at Stanford to put their classes online. It turned out that Sebastian Thrun decided to do the same thing, but didn’t tell anyone about it. He even recruited some of his students to develop the software for the online class system, in the hopes of turning it into a startup.

Some CS profs got upset at the way he went about it and his apparent plans of turning this model into a startup.

Check out Stanford’s online education system here http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php

A minor clarification: if Thrun is / was a _Research_ Professor at Stanford, he would not have had tenure. While he would have been eligible for a renewable contract with a 6-year horizon, he would not have had a lifetime appointment.

The Web Guidelines for Low Bandwidth
http://www.aptivate.org/webguidelines/Ho me.html

UNESCO International Community on Open Education Resources Final Report
http://oerwiki.iiep.unesco.org/images/7/ 74/Access2OER_final_report_1.pdf

Summary: If you really want to reach the world, you must use very simple low bandwidth materials.

Six years ago my family founded Humans Without Borders, an online education site involving methods I taught/used with critical care patients and families at Stanford Hospital, Clinics and surrounding community (see the paper, Haptic Medicine at http://www.21stcenturymed.org/fhti-hwb6- final.pdf or the site material http://www.21stcenturymed.org/hwb.org). Our purpose was to use the internet to
provide open access to rare healthcare teaching materials and methods primarily available to affluent and socially advantaged, but also in extending the reach of these precious teachings across physical borders to health care workers and individuals in remote locations, for use after a disaster and to address the disparities in healthcare. This we did, in French, Portuguese, English, and so on, and the site has between 6,000-10,000 new visitors a month… or roughly, a football stadium of people every year. The reason for writing is not to exclaim the project but to share a critical lesson for aspiring academics who will be creating material for on-line courses. To make Open Education a true reality, we must be aware the “Southern Global” regions are still bandwidth limited. Broadband Internet connections are extremely expensive in the developing world. Many users cannot afford them, and so have great difficulty accessing the Internet effectively and satisfactorily. To be unaware of this could inadvertently create an unintended isolation.

We who sit in offices crafting this material are mainly located in the northern hemisphere and think nothing of downloading movies or using the latest web and browser tools… The teaching material on the site is simple, lean, has very very few images, and zero ads. This is on purpose. We have developed the materials not for broadband access in the developed world but for slow Internet connection, for older browsers and operating systems, we do not use the latest web methods. Developing
teaching materials for the world, the whole world, not just bits of it, is a bit like sending a robot to Antarctica or outer space. You need to create solutions for
a computing environment other than your lab/office. Its the case that you don’t want to the latest and greatest, but the most reliable, the fastest, for the situation.

If you really want to reach the world, you must use very simple low bandwidth materials.

Some time ago YouTube moved a lot of their educational content to a separate domain giving people access a broad set of educational videos.

However, some complaints include the variety of the content found there as well as the need for schools to register on YouTube under the academic section in order to show their videos, leaving out many academics, professionals and students not formally associated with mainstream schools which contribute with great videos.

Many academics are posting great educational videos and materials online. The only problem is to sort the good ones from the rest and present them in an organized manner.

This effort is being done by: http://utubersity.com which presents the best educational videos available on YouTube in an organized, easy to find way to watch and learn. It also links the videos to related content in Wikipedia or associated websites.

They are classified and tagged in a way that enables people to find these materials more easily and efficiently and not waste time browsing through pages of irrelevant search results.

The website also enhances the experience using other means such as recommending related videos, Wikipedia content and so on. There’s also a Spanish version called http://utubersidad.com

They can perform a Voight-Kampff Empathy Test and get that all cleared up. ;-)