A free college level physics class was being offered
by Udacity, a Silicon Valley start-up and over 23,000 students (worldwide) are
enrolled. Part of this course has
hundreds of embedded YouTube videos for the students to view; however, when the
Pakistan Government blocked YouTube because of the anit-Muslim film that was
also available, numerous Pakistani students were instantly cut off from that
free source of education.
But what happened next was nothing short of a
miracle. Within an hour of the
shut-down, another student in the class from Malaysia started posting descriptions
of the videos for the Pakistanis and a young professor from Portugal who was
also taking the class started investigating a work-around to access YouTube for
the Pakistanis as well. Another student
from England warned these Pakistani students not to criticize their government
for fear of retribution.
These 23,000 students from 125 different countries
who had been working together, solving problems together in this online
environment for several weeks had developed solidarity that none of them realized
until the plug was pulled on YouTube access in Pakistan. Incidentally, these students from Pakistan
had just begun their final exam and while many of them felt SOL, many of them
passed their final exams because of the help provided by the other students
from all over the world. Notes were
shared and videos were downloaded and then uploaded to online sites that were
not blocked.
As a college teacher, I find this an inspiring story
as reported in TIME magazine 2012. I
read this story while in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, and the fact
that I was having a follow-up visit after having a cancerous melanoma removed
from my left foot, seemed so utterly insignificant in comparison to what these
Pakistani students endured. I was angry
with myself because I had been dwelling in a village of self-pity for far too
long.
And, while this scenario took place a little under a
year ago, in the late 1990’s (about 15 years ago) Cisco CEO John Chambers
forecasted that, “education over the internet is going to be so big, it is
going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” His forecasting was accurate but most online
training is very dull and boring and yet more and more Colleges and
Universities are offering online classes and degrees to accommodate those
students who do not want or cannot be in
a traditional classroom.
But, where will it end?
Should knowledge, in fact, be free? Do we pay for knowledge at college or do we
pay for the piece of paper? And, if it
is just a piece of paper for which we are paying, what’s wrong with me getting
that same knowledge off the Internet for free?
Nothing actually…
Will it one day be possible to acquire knowledge on
our own and then simply take a competency test to validate what has been
learned?
No comments:
Post a Comment