University 2.0?

This entry was written by Shane Colvin, Senior IT Engineer at the Faculty of Education Sciences at the University of Oslo. Shane has been an active member on the Hedda Team since 2001. He will periodically contribute to the blog by writing posts focused on the use of ICT (information and communication technologies) in higher education.
“Why teach 30 students, when you can teach millions?”
That is what Stanford professor and Google innovator Sebastian Thrun asked his audience while speaking at the DLD Conference in Germany. Unexpectedly, he went on to reveal that he will be giving up his prestigious tenured position at Stanford to launch his own platform for online teaching. Thrun has called his virtual university Udacity, whose website proclaims that, “We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world.” As a matter of fact Udacity now claims to have over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries, and has an army of volunteers to translate the classes into 44 languages. Impressive numbers for a Silicon Valley start-up company (Thrun refers to Udacity as his “company”) with its headquarters just minutes away from the titans of the global high-tech industry; namely Hewlett-Packard, Google and Facebook.
Take for example iTunes U and MiT’s Open CourseWare, they have been providing free high quality education for many years. Before Thrun had announced the launching of his online learning platform, I could observe nearly all of Stanford’s courses on iTunes U. Not to mention Hedda, who has had lectures, podcasts, seminars, conferences online and freely available since 2005. For me personally, I have been learning online with Lynda.com since 2003 and frankly not sure what I would do without this knowledge resource. Although I must admit, Lynda.com is not entirely free, only 10% of their courses are free. Rather, there is an annual fee of $250 to be granted enrollment, but that gives you access to over 1,300 full courses. More...