I think there will always be room for traditional brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. Coincidentally, we were discussing university with our daughter the other day (she's in 7th grade), and I strongly suggested to her that she attend a traditional school vs. an online college, primarily because of the social and interactive experiences. Plus she's a great softball player and expects to continue playing that sport beyond high school, which would be tough to do via the Internet!
However, I believe that online education is a fantastic resource for students with children; employees looking to grow into new careers or improve their promotion chances; people who want to explore other options; people with health issues; individuals with financial concerns, etc. And there are plenty of "traditional" students who, for one reason or another, would rather attend university/college online. Offering everyone the opportunity to further their education by multiple means cannot be a bad thing at all!
I am all for education promotion using all available means.
But if it was in my power, instead of such courses offered for higher-end higher-ed type courses (often utilized by people who possibly could afford online, multi-media or printed books on such topics), I would have major sponsors fund similar efforts to enable basic education to the billions who neither have PCs, nor Internet connections, nor, often, even electricity.
A global network of WLAN enabled kiosks or banks of kiosks enabling every child on every continent to be able to get a basic education, at zero cost. That would take away one excuse poor parents have to not send kids to schools in those parts of the world.
You may say I'm a dreamer.....but I'm not the only one... I hope.
We can hope that the tradition-bound and staid academics who zealously and jealously guard their bailiwicks with vicious rapacity (as the joke runs, because the stakes are so incredibly low) will see the light, but historically speaking, they would rather die than allow something that will actually aid distance learning and non-traditional educational methods. Simply put, the more time they have in academia, and the higher their degrees, the less flexible they are likely to be. It is therefore intuitively obvious (to even the most casual observer) that this will require more than just the inprimitur of a well-known nerd to make any headway against the tide of time. And that's just the way they like it.
If the top universities are promoting it and with financial backing from Bill Gates, online education will be officially mainstream with many other schools to follow.
Perhaps the main critical issue will be protecting the brick and mortar environment (the traditional classroom setting).
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
