Posted on 3rd August 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Schools we now have
online_courses, universities
A sign of the decline of established education is this response to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s call for cost-savings recommendations: students should go off-campus to complete at least ten percent of their degree requirements. An article in Wired Campus describes how online courses could be used to compensate for the inability of universities to deliver in the old analog way.
This quotation from the article contains a revealing nugget about what is happening spontaneously in the growth of online learning:
Richard Garrett, managing director at the consulting firm Eduventures, said requiring online education “would seem unnecessary” because it’s already “increasingly difficult to graduate from a mainstream higher-education institution and not have taken something that is more or less an online course.”
“It might create more negative feeling and go against what’s a pretty organic trend already,” he said. “In many ways, online is most successful where it’s been significantly bottom up rather than top down.”
Here is the nugget — a clue that individual students, not pedagogical planners, are choosing online opportunities to meet their own goals: it’s been significantly bottom up rather than top down. This fact demonstrates, among other things, the reality of students taking their schooling into their own hands.
Posted on 7th July 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Schools we now have
branches, Dubai, universities
The Gulf education fiscal government role in the availability of Western top university branches is described in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, that says in part:
Michigan State University is canceling all undergraduate programs at its branch campus in Dubai, effectively reducing what was meant to be the university’s beachhead in the Middle East to a mere office. . . .
What set Michigan State’s Dubai campus apart from the branch campuses that many other prominent Western universities have opened in the Persian Gulf region was that the campus was eventually required to break even: Student tuition had to cover its operating costs.
For Western universities that have opened branch campuses in much wealthier locales than Dubai—New York University in Abu Dhabi or Texas A&M University in Qatar, for example—local governments underwrite everything from the cost of campus construction to faculty salaries to research. Student tuition is almost a bonus.
Not so in Dubai, which has minimal oil reserves and a local government that is unable to simply underwrite the costs of first-class higher education.
It is interesting to note that the rich locales in the Persian Gulf is where Western universities are viable. Why? Because the local government has the money to do it it: government pays the bills.
So what about the university-age population who are not in the locales where the money is? Many go abroad to study, if they have their own money or get the funding. The Chronicle article does not give the facts on who attends native higher institutions in the Gulf. Wikipedia reports that about 10% of the population of Dubai have higher education degrees.
The operative role of higher education money from rich governments — and rich people — is obvious. How long will the riches last is unknowable. Yet the bigger question is: what about all the other inquiring young minds among the 90% without money in Dubai. They, as well as the millions of educationally underserved of poorer countries are increasing able to access the knowledge the want to learn online. For example, Michigan State Universities Libraries have an extensive Middle Eastern Studies collection. Let us hope that soon this collection will be opened for use by students worldwide. All Dubai students, for example, could use the university’s virtual beachhead to enter superb knowledge venues. Instead the university was trying to raise enough from the tuition of less than 500 students in Dubai which allow just them to use the Michigan State University Libraries from on-site in Dubai.
