Skip to main content

Online education and the disruption of the traditional education system

Online learning has started to move into the mainstream. Stamford, MIT and others have been offering online classes for years but  in the past few years the idea really stated to take off.  While it may seem obvious that the Internet might provide a great conduit to educate, it has taken dozens of years for the approach to gain traction. As online education improves there are clear signs of disruption in the traditional education system.

Udacity CS344 - Introduction to parallel programming


The model for online courses is a powerful one. A single set of materials can be created once and distributed at almost zero incremental cost. Some courses are self paced and fully automated. Others are supported by a teacher and staff that grade submissions, provides help on forums and may hold group chats. Some colleges/courses are experimenting with a hybrid model that leverages the Internet to deliver the portions of the course best suited to it, such as lecture notes or pre-recorded lecture videos, and gets students together in person for group work, discussions and lab hours.

A common theme in online education is experimentation and innovation. Like charter schools, online education appears to be innovating at a pace that is threatening traditional education.

Minnesota's department of higher education stepped into a public backlash last year when they told teachers it wasn't legal to take courses on Coursera. There is also resistance from teachers, San Jose State University faculty recently voted against joining edX.

I'll make the not so crazy prediction that the next few years will bring us a wide range of push-back against online education. Expect more legislation, stories about "concern" over quality, and other efforts to slow online education. Education is a huge industry and the entrenched players are likely to move quickly to expand their online efforts.


Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 18, 2016 at 2:39 AM

    A common theme in online education is experimentation and innovation. But what can we tell about traditional education? What is the difference between online and traditional education? Find the answer in main difference between online and traditional education

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debugging an imprecise bus access fault on a Cortex-M3

This information may apply to other cortex series processors but is written from practical experience with the Cortex-M3. Imprecise bus access faults are ambiguous, as noted by the term "imprecise". Compared to precise bus errors, imprecise errors are much trickier to debug and especially so without a deep understanding of arm processors and assembly language. Imprecise and precise flags are found in the BusFault status register, a byte in the CFSR (Configurable Fault Status Register). BusFault status register bits The definition for imprecise and precise bits is: [2] IMPRECISERR Imprecise data bus error: 0 = no imprecise data bus error 1 = a data bus error has occurred, but the return address in the stack frame is not related to the instruction that caused the error. When the processor sets this bit to 1, it does not write a fault address to the BFAR. This is an asynchronous fault. Therefore, if it is detected when the priority of the current pr
5 comments
Read more

Graco Swing By Me - Battery to AC wall adapter modification

If you have one of these Graco battery powered swings you are probably familiar with the cost of C batteries! The swing takes four of them and they only last a handful of days. I'm not sure if the newer models support being plugged into the wall but ours didn't. If you are a little familiar with electronics and soldering, here is a rough guide on how you can modify yours to plug in! I wasn't sure how exactly to disassemble the swing side where the batteries were. I was able to open up the clamshell a bit but throughout this mod I was unable to determine how to fully separate the pieces. I suspect that there is some kind of a slip plate on the moving arm portion. The two parts of the plastic are assembled and the moving arm portion with the slip plate is slid onto the shaft. Because of the tension in that slip plate it doesn't want to back away, and because of the mechanicals that portion of the assembly doesn't appear accessible in order to free it. I was
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory efficient queuing of variable length elements

In embedded environments memory can be a critical driver of the design of data structures and containers. Computing resources have been expanding steadily each year but there are still a wide range of systems with far less than a megabyte of memory. On systems with tens of kilobytes of memory, structures are often designed to be compact to maximize data density. Rather than splurging on memory aligned elements that would be faster for the processor to access, a developer will typically use types with minimal sizes based on the known range of values that the element is intending to hold. Fixed sized buffers At my day job a fixed size pool of messages was implemented to hold message data. While this achieved one design goal of using statically allocated buffers, avoiding dynamic allocations that might fail at runtime, it isn't efficient if there is a wide range of message sizes. It isn't efficient because each message uses a message buffer. With small message sizes the buff
2 comments
Read more