Minerva CEO Details His High-Tech Plan To Disrupt Universities

waderoush (1271548) writes "In April 2012, former Snapfish CEO Ben Nelson provoked both praise and skepticism by announcing that he'd raised $25 million from venture firm Benchmark to start the Minerva Project, a new kind of university where students will live together but all class seminars will take place over a Google Hangouts-style video conferencing system. Two years later, there are answers – or the beginnings of answers – to many of the questions observers have raised about the project, on everything from the way the seminars will be organized to how much tuition the San Francisco-based university will charge and how its gaining accreditation. And in an interview published today, Nelson share more details about how Minerva plans to use technology to improve teaching quality. 'If a student wants football and Greek life and not doing any work for class, they have every single Ivy League university to choose from,' Nelson says. 'That is not what we provide. Similarly, there are faculty who want to do research and get in front of a lecture hall and regurgitate the same lecture they've been giving for 20 years. We have a different model,' based on extensive faculty review of video recordings of the seminars, to make sure students are picking up key concepts. Last month Minerva admitted 45 students to its founding class, and in September it expects to welcome 19 of them to its Nob Hill residence hall."

first the college athletes want to form a Union...

[turkeydance]

and now this? can the NCAA and the AAUP form a strong enough political bond to thwart this freedom-thingie?

Re:Ivy League Schools

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

The Ivy League was basically a formal gentleman's agreement (you know, back from the good old days where they banned women and blacks from campus and had strict quotas on Jews) that they would mutually agree to be terrible at sports in order to maintain high academic standards.

Everyone who attends an Ivy League school to play sports is someone who would have been a serious consideration for admission without their athletic ability.

Re:This Republican scam to destroy education...

[Attila Dimedici]

Umm, have you looked at who runs the schools that are failing to teach minorities to read? In particular you might want to take a close look at the party affiliation of those running the school boards, and the rest of the political machinery of the local government in those place. Further, you might want to look at the history of the political party in question. Then you should ask yourself, if they still held to the political philosophy and beliefs they held in 1860, what would they do differently to better accomplish goals in line with that political philosophy?

Re:why not just go the trades / apprenticeship sys

[MacTO]

In many cases what you suggest is sound. In many other cases, it is not.

For instance, you could probably get away with an apprenticeship for computer programming. Yet you would not get away with an apprenticeship for computer science. There is too much background knowledge that must be acquired for that to be viable. Besides, universities are pretty much an apprenticeship for computer scientists once they hit graduate school. (Assuming that the student is going into research, of course.)

Universities also serve many other functions. At least that is the case for students who are going about things in an intelligent manner. Since the goal is learning, rather than training, the student is free to think. You also have opportunities to make contact with other people in the field, may they be your peers or your instructors. This opens up both research and employment opportunities.

That all assumes that the student is doing more than attending lectures, reading books, and completing assignments. It assumes that the student is being more than a student. One of my professors put it best when he said that he isn't the instructor and we aren't his students. Rather, we are all colleagues. Unfortunately, most of the students didn't get that.

Re:Ivy League Schools

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh, did that hit a little close to home? What does it say about our elites when they can't take a little (well-placed and accurate) criticism? Why are you using a word like "capitalist" as an epithet?

A quick question: how many corrupt government officials will the Ivy League graduate this year? How many of them will go on to oppress the American people with outrageous, unworkable ideas while all the time enjoying the approval of their own consciences? The Ivy League exists to perpetrate a culture of class warfare and hatred of ordinary folk. Life would be better without it - and yes, I'm including all the scientists and whatnot.

Of course, such a conclusion is poison and cannot be accepted, and normal people who get uppity need to be shown their place with the greatest of rudeness, and a couple of knocks in the head from the mercenary troops, er, I mean private security guards.