Comments on: The Cost of Cheap Education http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/ A Teaching Blog from the University of North Dakota Office of Instructional Development Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:49:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Laurie Fendrich http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-153 Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:15:09 +0000 http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-153 Jaynicks needs to learn to read text more carefully (perhaps distance learning affected his reading comprehension). Nowhere did I predict that people will turn into robots; I was asserting that distance learning, in itself, turns people into robots. It’s an opinion, with which he obviously can disagree. But it’s not a prediction.

]]> By: Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge « Open Science's Blog http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-138 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:30:21 +0000 http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-138 [...] of the anxiety about the market approach is territorial, from professors concerned for their jobs. Some of it is about the repercussions of unbundling the university: profitable offerings like [...]

]]> By: Teaching Tuesday: Looking Ahead and Looking Back « Teaching Thursdays http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-120 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:19:59 +0000 http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-120 [...] Just a quick Teaching Tuesday post. The entire Teaching Thursday staff was thrilled when the post, “The Cost of Cheap Education” by Anne Kelsch and John Tagg was linked to from this New York Times article. I am frequently asked whether anyone actually reads [...]

]]> By: jaynicks http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-116 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:26:40 +0000 http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/#comment-116 I read The Dystopia of Distance Learning, By Laurie Fendrich who said, “Predictions about the way things will be in 50 years — or even five, or one, for that matter — are seldom right.”

She seems to have forgotten the thought a few paragraphs later when she allows us to infer that distance learning will turn us mechanical, “I say to hell with efficiency and productivity if it means any more distance learning than we already have. What’s the point of living if we all turn into robots?”

It is OK, her predictions — are seldom right.

Time shifted, distance learning can improve learning. e.g. it is highly likely that the Introductory Physics course lectures in a vast majority of United States institutions are markedly inferior to Professor Lewin’s Physics 8.01 lectures at

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/VideoLectures/detail/embed01.htm

and

By the way, this is Creative Commons material so any state institution could be distributing the lectures in conjunction with locally developed ancillary courseware, for credit, even on a DVD.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/terms/terms/index.htm#cc

It seems like for many it would be an opportunity to improve learning dramatically, not only for enrolled students but also reaching a vastly larger number of non-traditional and advanced high school students. If tuition costs were dropped considerably income might soar.

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