The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Author:Kevin Carey [Carey, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-03T07:00:00+00:00

7

Anything for Anyone, Anywhere

Putting The Secret of Life online wasn’t Eric Lander’s idea. The course was offered through a nonprofit organization called edX located a block away from the MIT Brain and Cognitive Science Complex in Cambridge. EdX began as an MIT initiative and was quickly joined by Harvard in 2012. A host of other elite research universities from around the world soon followed. By 2014, edX was offering hundreds of free online courses in subjects including the Poetry of Walt Whitman, the History of Early Christianity, Computational Neuroscience, Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics, Shakespeare, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bioethics, Contemporary India, Historical Relic Treasures and Cultural China, Linear Algebra, Autonomous Mobile Robots, Electricity and Magnetism, Discrete Time Signals and Systems, Introduction to Global Sociology, Behavioral Economics, Fundamentals of Immunology, Computational Thinking and Data Science, and an astrophysics course titled Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe.

Doing this seemed to contradict five hundred years of higher-education economics in which the wealthiest and most sought-after colleges enforced a rigid scarcity over their products and services. The emerging University of Everywhere threatened institutions that depended on the privilege of being scarce, expensive places. Why would the world’s greatest universities spend millions of dollars developing courses only to give them away?

The answer was that they were jostling for a dominant position on the next great stage of higher learning. And that they had been spurred to do so by the threat of mortal competition from a group of highly capitalized technology start-up companies that were bound and determined to get there first.

—

SILICON VALLEY was built on manufacturing. Some of the companies there are still in that business, including Apple and Intel. But making physical things is a tough financial row to hoe. Even with patent protection, you can get ground down by competitors that are better at optimizing supply chains and buying inexpensive labor. There are enormous downward pressures on prices, which is why every year stores sell bigger, nicer flat-screen televisions for less money. And if you come out on top, that means managing a large organization with tens of thousands of employees, plus factories, trucks, equipment, warehouses, etc. It doesn’t leave much time for your yacht.

Software, on the other hand, is a different game. It’s intellectual property. With ubiquitous broadband, cheap computers, and the cloud, the only physical thing you need to make software is a bunch of ergonomically designed black office chairs for your programmers to sit on and tables where they can rest their MacBooks and empty pizza boxes. It doesn’t take tens of thousands of programmers to make great software; in fact, once you add too many cooks to the development kitchen, software tends to get worse. Michael Staton and his buddies speak with awe about coders like David Heinemeier Hansson, a thirty-four-year-old Danish wunderkind, the “Elvis of software engineers,” who created the popular Ruby on Rails Web development framework, races sports cars in his spare time, and is, they say, worth one hundred ordinary men.

The cost of reproducing software is essentially

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.