Word: saylor
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Your piece on billionaire Michael Saylor's notion of creating a free worldwide online university [EDUCATION, March 27] states that there is little scholarly research in this area. In fact, there is a growing body of literature that documents the efficacy of online learning compared with campus-based instruction. But what is distressing is the persistent indictment of distance education by skeptical faculty. In 1998, 1,680 institutions enrolled 1.6 million students in 54,000 distance courses, and an ever increasing proportion are online. To refer to this burgeoning phenomenon as naive and as counterfeit education or to declare that...
...from books. When I hit industry, I had to retrain myself anyway. Same for my kids. I wasted a lot of hard-earned money on degrees because of a myth vigorously perpetuated by the collegiate elite: that anyone without a bricks-and-mortar degree is ignorant. Three cheers for "Saylor U."! ROBERT WILLIAMS Na'alehu, Hawaii...
...what Saylor seems to have overlooked is that a virtual university simply cannot offer the same experience its real world counterpart can. Sure, you can stick a few lectures online and have chatroom discussions, but that's like having an Oreo cookie without the cream. What's missing in a virtual learning experience is life outside the classroom...
Society also supports education acquired via traditional means. Take correspondence courses, for example. These courses offer a form of distance learning similar to that proposed by Saylor; in both, students sign up for courses and can get a degree without ever stepping foot in a classroom. Yet, degrees earned through established correspondence courses are commonly held to be inferior to those earned at universities. An online university would simply be the high-tech version of the correspondence course...
...while Saylor's idealistic vision of a virtual university for all is laudable, it will never be the Internet Ivy experience for which he hopes. The merits of distance education can best be summed up by Georgetown English Professor Carole Fungaroli's comment, "It's the same as sex on the Internet. You can get it online, but it's not as good as in person...