According to Theresa Johnston, in
the Stanford magazine, “Online
technologies are shaking up the Farm’s [Stanford’s] classrooms....” In the
last school year 100,000 people decided to take an online course that focused
on applied machine learning which in plain English is “getting computers to act
without being explicitly programmed.” Taped lessons, assignments, and exams
were all free to anyone all over the world. Students didn’t receive Stanford
credits for completing the course, but they did receive congratulatory
letters. Although some Stanford
professors worry about the trend to make lectures available online both to
their enrolled students and to others, the university’s president John Hennessy
believes that online learning can transform education, and refers to it as a
“tsunami coming”. The problem is getting
ready for the storms which, like tsunamis, aren’t noticed until they hit shore.
What part do universities play in offering courses for all, and how will high
schools deal with this? How will online education affect what we think of as a
university and what we think of as a high school? Is education, as we know it,
going to be a thing of the past?
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