Online Course And College Degree

Q: how long before we will be designing programs ... by just having students navigate the internet?? guess us in traditional academe need to be planning our retirements a bit earlier than planned ...

A: I think that we're definitely headed in that direction. Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Age of Spiritual Machines," would say that virtual courses (and even virtual campuses) will be commonplace within the next 5 years, by 2009 at the latest. I'm curious about what the implications are, based on this trend, for assessment and testing. In particular: 1. How will students be assessed in these virtual courses? 2. Will large-scale testing have to change in order to meet the demands for these virtual universities? If so, what types of changes can we expect to see? i had commented that i had put in 'statistics' and got out 9 links ... but in actuality ... what i forgot to see was that that was only the FIRST page of ... 110 records! now, someone today showed me another link to an international database ... http://www.dlcoursefinder.com/ which is supposed to have about 40,000 in its database ... so i typed in 'statistics' again and found ... 280 listings!!! it would be interesting to see what overlap there is between the two databases and, which ones one got and the other missed, and vice versa ... in addition, i noted in the first database ... the url links to THAT specific course tended to be given but, in the second case ... urls were given to a more general link of ALL courses at that site ... which would mean you would have to do further searching in ANY case ... these appear to be tremendous resources (how good any of the stuff is, i have no idea) this reminds me of the old argument about using SAT scores for admission purposes ... in the face of all the other information that is available on students who submit applications to college ... we have all their high school (and before) records including performance on many standardized tests ... grades from dozens and dozens of courses ... information on what kinds of outside activities students have or have not participated in ... and the list goes on and on. however, colleges and universities seem to think and certainly act as though they DESPERATELY NEED SAT scores ... inorder to make reasonable admissions decisions. this is just not true ... if we dropped them tomorrow ... it would not make a bit of difference in the 'quality' of our admission decisions why do they keep doing it then? good question ... but, shouldn't parents and others who see through this rebel ... complain ... tell them to quit wasting our money? if companies really don't think that college/university education is helpful for their employees to have ... then we need to call their hands ... to do otherwise is to continue a scam ... but, i would like to see the hard evidence that most companies ... with their skilled recruits ... in accounting, or public relations, or advertising, or ... law firms ... or working for national geographic in their cartograpy department ... DON'T value the college education of the students that they employ ... where does this hard data exist? every company MUST provide on the job training .... even when we hire a new faculty member for penn state ... we have to do that too. but, that is not the same as saying that their previous collegiate training was not highly valued ...

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