By: Carter Lockwood, Flathat News
The higher education world was taken aback last year when Sebastian Thrun, vice president of Google and professor at Stanford University, offered a robotics course to the largest class anyone’s ever heard of: 160,000 students. With the power of the Internet and educational software, Thrun was able to give the same assignments and tests to people from dozens of different countries, at no cost. Efforts to provide course materials online, spearheaded by Harvard and MIT, are still in their earliest stages, but they’re already being talked about as the future of global education. Innovative schools looking to curb the exploding costs of a college degree will find it redundant to pay professors to give the same lecture dozens of times throughout their careers, to a few students at a time. We now live in a world where anyone can access a pre-recorded lecture, and anyone can have a conversation with the professor about the material without needing to be in the same room. No more 8 a.m. lectures — class will be whenever you want it to be, fitting the needs of students who demand more and more flexibility each year.
http://flathatnews.com/2012/09/13/keeping-up-with-online-educatio/
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