The end of university campus life

The university as the institution of learning is under threat from digital challengers offering MOOCs— Massive Open Online Courses. Professor Jim Barber says this confirms what we already know, that information is more or less valueless and universities might as well give it away. . As its name suggests, a MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, is a university course that is provided on the internet free-of-charge to anyone who cares to enrol in it. In all of the media hype trumpeting the arrival MOOCs, it’s the M for massive in the acronym that has captured the public imagination. No wonder. When Stanford University professor, Sebastian Thrun, offered his first MOOC on artificial intelligence less than two years ago, 160,000 students turned up on the internet. Attrition rates were high at about 85 per cent. But, this still meant that 24,000 students successfully completed the course and some 350 of them actually scored full marks. Thrun estimated that results like these would have taken him 20 years to achieve if he had offered his course in the conventional fashion. Read the full article> Photo: flickr / Emory Maide