tiistai 9. lokakuuta 2012

Higher education and radical equality


The MOOC on current/future state of higher education started with presenting two current trends that were said to be opposing: there's a need for bigger and better universities but for smaller costs.

Without profound changes they are of course incompatible. It's like Encyclopedia Britannica would have wanted to double its volume (or amount of sold books) without adding costs. We know how the story wound up.

There are several thousand classmates attending this CFHE12 course. Input-wise: so far so good. How about quality of learning? How about dropouts? If there are enough (and free) raw materials to be spared, does it matter in the end of the production line?

The fundamentals of higher education lay on hierarchies. Now, the model of crowd-sourcing knowledge like Wikipedia did is a very different one.

What would a university be like, if it was not based on line organization but on something else, like matrix organization or perhaps a neural network? Would that change the way you defined "higher" education?

PS. Radical equality in the title refers to Juha Suoranta's and Tere Vadén's article in Learning the Virtual Life: Public Pedagogy in a Digital World.

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