comment by thenewgreen

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thenewgreen · 4662 days ago · link · · parent · post: Obama vs. Colleges: It’s About Time!

“The President is proposing to shift some Federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide good value.” -This is great.... if he actually follows through with it. I'm pretty tired of empty rhetoric, we'll see if this has any impact at all.

If I were a university though, I would be scared right now and not just because of this "warning", but because of this too: http://hubski.com/pub?id=14940 -Pretty cool.

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thundara · 4662 days ago · link ·

I was discussing the administration's attempts to cap tuition with a friend a few days ago and he mentioned that it's very disappointing that the federal government isn't recognizing the advantage of online learning systems and investing any significant money them.

+discuss+discuss

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thenewgreen · 4662 days ago · link ·

Exactly. You want to retrain displaced workers?....online or "distance" learning could be a big part of the solution.

+discuss+discuss

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thundara · 4660 days ago · link ·

Not only that, think of how much it would lower the cost and increase the quality if you only had to get a few of the best professors to record their lectures once. Imagine having blog posts every week, similar to OkCupid, showing what subjects are learned quickly, how much time people really should be spending to comprehensively learn a class. Imagine being able to integrate SRS and have a clean set of lecture notes for every class.

Once a framework has been laid down, classes can constantly be revised without the pressures of teachers also having to review for the same lecture every year. The quality can only go up! And instead of being stuck with that one shitty math teacher at your university, you can pick from the most popular online ones because suddenly they can teach a thousand students simultaneously with no significant increase in effort on their part.

You'll still have to maintain some organized group of teachers to answer individuals' questions and practice one-on-one or in small groups, but even part of that can be optimized away with online class discussion systems like piazza. Hell, maybe Watson might even be able to answer frequently asked questions.