Online Courses and the $100 Graduate Degree 339
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by
samzenpus
from the no-need-for-a-loan dept.
from the no-need-for-a-loan dept.
First time accepted submitter GCA10 writes "Forbes reports on the latest project of Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun (the proponent of self-driving cars.) He's moved on to education now, believing that conventional university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ineffective to survive for long. So he started Udacity, which aims to deliver an online version of a master's degree for $100 per student. From the article: 'Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”'"
Re:Hopefully this succeeds (Score:4, Informative)
I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer.
A PhD is free in the United States. I just completed my Doctorate and I was paid $20,000 per year to do it. In the sciences and engineering fields, at a research university, you're paid off of grant money. Tuition usually either waved or paid for you off the grant.
Now if you go into a non reacher field like the humanities or the pure mathematics, you will have to pay your own way.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:1, Informative)
Would be nice but the people who make the tests, grade work, produce classes, etc all expect to be paid. At the college level those people have decades of training and don't come cheap.
Re:I took his AI class (Score:4, Informative)
160,000 students @ $100 each is $16M.
$16M at $32k buys 500 TAs / year.
160K students / 500 TAs is 320 students / TA.
One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.
That's not that far off from being reasonable.
If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.
A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two. One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.
There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Informative)
The opposite of "a social network makes finding a job easier" is not "no social network makes finding a job impossible".
Besides, immigrants tend to have very good social networks, composed of other immigrants from the same country of origin.