A little while ago I blogged about the potential challenge which online education can pose for the traditional model of the university, comparing and contrasting the positions of newspapers and universities as they face online challenges. Now I see that Grant McCracken is also musing that what’s happening to journalism may some day happen to higher education (disintermediating higher education) – the Washington Post also notes that online classes are just cheaper to produce – but then McCracken points out that whilst there may be a move towards self-instruction, the key difference between newspapers and universities is accreditation:

We will continue to need a university, or someone, to certify students have completed their degree requirements, and perhaps how they did. Then the question becomes:

what’s the best way to do accreditation?

The English universities are a useful indicator. Traditionally, they forgave the separation [of] knowledge acquisition from examination. The universities allowed the student an extraordinary latitude. If a student could pass her exams, it didn’t matter if she had spent all her time in the college bar. She was good to go.

We could use a model of this kind. We would leave it to students to prepare their own programs of education, to gather on line with whomever they found interesting and useful.

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Techdirt points to an article in Washington Monthly which raises the possibility of College for $99 a Month. The theme of the piece is that the next generation of online education could be great for students, but catastrophic for universities. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.

From Techdirt:

Next Up For Disruption? College

… The article in Washington Monthly discusses a company called StraighterLine, which offers online college classes, but it totally disrupts the traditional business model of university learning. While the classic model is that you pay per class (or per semester as a fully matriculated student), StraighterLine has a simple model: you pay $99/month and get an all-you-can-eat offering. You go at your own pace — so if you have lots of time (and can complete the work) you can take multiple classes in that month. In the opening story of the article, a woman completes four full classes in just two months — for a grand total of $200. Taking those same classes at either local universities or online would have cost thousands, and would have taken much longer to complete. And, it’s not as if the StraighterLine courses skimp either. According to the article (and it would be great to hear from anyone who’s tried it to see if this is true), they use the same materials found in many college courses.

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On the process by which decisions are taken in the University, Intersecting Sets has this quote from Cornford’s sardonic Microcosmographia Academica (html | pdf):

No one can tell the difference between a Liberal Conservative Caucus and a Conservative Liberal one. There is nothing in the world more innocent than either. The most dare-devil action they ever take is to move for the appointment of a Syndicate ‘to consider what means, if any, can be discovered to prevent the Public Washing of Linen, and to report, if they can see straight, to the Non-placets.’ The result is the formation of an invertebrate body, which sits for two years, with growing discomfort, on the clothes-basket containing the linen. When the Syndicate is so stupefied that it has quite forgotten what it is sitting on, it issues three minority reports, of enormous bulk, on some different subject. The reports are referred by the Council to the Non-placets, and by the Non-placets to the wastepaper basket. This is called ‘reforming the University from within.’ (pp 6-7)

In a similar vein:

The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one.

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