Getting beyond professors in a can
Starting about 15 years ago, various American universities began putting lecture videos on the Internet. This was supposed to democratize education and make the great ideas available to all. The impact of this revolution hardly registered. Canning lectures on video began in the 1960s and changing the transport medium from closed-circuit TV to satellite to VHS tape to DVD to streaming IP packets doesn’t change the educational value of a university lecture, which has been found to be minimal by nearly all pedagogy researchers. Learning at a university comes from solving problems while getting assistance from other students and teachers.
I always wondered why the various university lecture Web sites didn’t have at least a discussion forum attached to each class. That way interested Web learners could find each other. Finally there is a guy trying to create a reasonable online learning experience, using university materials as a base and standard online community tools as the medium. More: a New York Times story about the effort and uopeople.org.
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