The most important education technology in 200 years

[RAMA]

Education is about to change dramatically, says Anant Agarwal, who heads edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, with plans to teach a billion student

http://www.technologyreview.com/news...-in-200-years/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-most-i...y-in-200-years

[sojourner]

Ah, so Mr. Agarwal has finally caught on to this internet thing. Glad he joined the rest of us in the 21st century.

[gturner]

Is the format going to have a way that you can videochat with the hot co-eds in class?

[Deckerd]

The most important education tool in the past 200 years is, and probably will be for the next 200, television.

[gturner]

I don't know. The pencil and eraser rate way up there, as would the chalk board, but it goes back to 1801 and falls just outside the 200 year limit.

[RoJoHen]

In 200 years the most important education technology will be the textbook that delivers information to your brain via osmosis when you fall asleep in class.

[Robert Maxwell]

RAMA wrote:

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Education is about to change dramatically, says Anant Agarwal, who heads edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, with plans to teach a billion student

http://www.technologyreview.com/news...-in-200-years/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-most-i...y-in-200-years

Well, edX is not particularly novel, given all the other free online courses there are.

On top of that, cheating is rampant, which I find puzzling. These are courses with no credit. The only benefit you get is what you learn. And people still don't want to learn, they want to cheat their way through.

Apart from accreditation, the lack of direct interaction with instructors is probably the biggest thing that sets this this sort of system back. Sure, you could have one professor teaching 10,000 students... which means the prof never has time to directly interact with more than a tiny handful of those. If you think things are bad in auditorium-sized college classes now, I can only imagine how much worse the situation is when the class size goes up an order of magnitude (or two.)

It's good that knowledge is becoming cheaper and more accessible, however this is not something we can simply thank online universities for. It's been a growing trend since the Web first came to prominence. People like sharing information, and many of them tend not to mind doing it for free.

Touting this as the "most important education technology in 200 years" is more than a little hyperbole.

[publiusr]

I guess I'm an old fogey, but I loved the smell of chalk, the sound of said chalk on the chalkboard. I miss the ways paper and pencil used to smell. There was a scene in "All The President's Men" where they are at the old card catalog, flipping the cards. The foley artist did such great work.

Maybe the web won't kill long-form reading:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/me...s-2313874.html

And maybe it will
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/ed.../04laptop.html