Introducing The Floating University | Hacker News Reader

Introducing The Floating University

floatinguniversity.com

94 pointsturing42 comments

These types of sites, TED, Khan Academy, etc. get me so excited for the future. Unfortunately the phrase 'everyone, everywhere' comes with that little asterisk: *with high-speed internet access. I think a movement to get internet to 'everyone, everywhere' needs to happen along side this internet education movement to be as potentially world-changing as I'd like to imagine it. Not that the education movement alone isn't great, there is a huge gap between being able to afford high-speed internet and affording/getting into a good college.

Still, the set of "everyone, everywhere with high-speed internet access" is larger than the set of "everyone, everywhere with money and access to a top-tier university."

Red herring. Internet access will only become faster, cheaper, and more prevalent. It's not the job of educators or video producers to string fibers in Africa, after all.

I think it's a completely different discussion - bringing The Knowledge Of The World to people and places that don't have it - than online education systems.

Yeah but you are talking about everyone with access to a library, or a computer and a McDonald, Barnes and Noble ...

> comes with that little asterisk: *with high-speed internet access

By the end of the decade, I expect that >90% of humanity will have this (or be able to easily afford it).

Even in africa , for places where bandwidth is expensive, once the community got computers, or android phones, it's pretty easy and cheap to distribute some content from khan or TED,without needing internet access for each person.

And that speaks English.

For example, there is this brand new country called East Timor (1 million people) who decided 9 years ago that the official languages would be Portugese and Tetum.

As for fast internet, while it is north of Darwin, Australia, it is connected via satellite to Miami, Florida. The fastest residential* internet money can buy is 512k/64k (on paper) for 200 USD / month. And that is already unreliable in the capital city.

Using your own satellite dish is around 1k$ for 1Mb/128k.

*Professional speed is up to 2Mbps for 6000$

The fact that this will be offered for credit at accredited universities with physical campuses is really intriguing. Often efforts like this have difficulty getting the institutional buyin that will lead to real change.

As a side note, they could have chosen a name with a better acronym -- FU already has meaning attached to it for a lot of people.

Heh. That's up there with the university once known as the Cassurina University of Northern Territory. They changed their name pretty quickly.

I imagine the people who wouldn't be able to get past the 'FU' thing probably wouldn't bother going to university anyway. It's like with the Wii, we all had a little giggle when we first heard it and then we got over it.. except for those few people..

It isn't the people going to the university that will be the problem: it will be trying to explain what you are doing to your parents, employers, or friends. I got my degree from "The College of Creative Studies", which has one of the top physics programs in the nation; this is understood by grad programs you talk to, but all those people external to the academic process just look at you as if you are insane, and went to some kind of lala-happy program.

I can't say for Harvard or Bard, but at Yale, this course is a seminar. You can watch the videos whenever you want, but you also have physical class on Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:20, where you'll discuss the readings and the professors (Peter Salovey and Adam Glick) will try to make you think in an interdisciplinary way.

Although the online aspect and all that is great, I think this is novel for another reason. Charlie Munger, vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway, has often talked about building a latticework of mental models i.e. take the big ideas from various disciplines, and use those models to solve problems. This course is basically a physical version of what he's espoused his whole life.

I'm definitely going to try to get into this course - sounds awesome!

> "Floating University subscriptions will also be available to the general public with full course packs and video lectures via the Internet."

Any idea what this is going to cost?

Thought it was kind of interesting that they didn't have any sort of cost in the FAQ section. I would think that that would be a frequently asked question.

Yep, the lack of transparency just made me think "next" - I'll be looking into Stanford's free AI courses. Or the many other free courses out there. I couldn't figure out what FU's value prop is that makes it worth $495.

Maybe "FU" is an appropriate name after all.

The individual subscription fee is $495 and lectures are available for up to 6 months from the date of purchase.

http://floatinguniversity.com/courses

I'm confused as to how this works. Is it just pre-recorded videos? The site says "no homework, no tests". If you just watch the videos, how does it reinforce what you've learned? Is there any interaction with the instructor?

There's an in-class presentation and a final paper, according to the syllabus:

http://floatinguniversity.com/files/Great%20Big%20Ideas%20-%...

Cool. But is the future of education really having professors give lectures, except now it's online?

Here are some brainstorm ideas for alternatives:

* Allow anyone, not just existing professors, create a course on any topic and of any length. May the best teachers win.

* Allow and encourage students to make their own lectures and courses.

* Enable and encourage two-way communication. Perhaps people can post responses to other people's lectures.

Good ideas but I think you're describing the internet as it exists in general.

Youtube is only one-way I suppose but it facilitates channels like the Khan Academy ( http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy ).

YouTube is good, but it isn't really designed for education. How can you give out assignments with YouTube? What about paying teachers? A YouTube-for-education would be explicitly designed to bring people together for learning purposes. And money would probably need to be involved... people should be paid to teach. After watching some free samples, students would probably be willing to pay to watch videos from some teachers, or to have their work critiqued by those teachers.

Those don't address the credential aspect of a degree program.

I don't think credentials are very meaningful. An alternative is to let students simply display all their work on the internet. Employers can check out their work to determine their eligibility for a job.

How long do you think it would it take an employer to read through 50 Masters level thesis papers on chemical engineering, plus few hundred shorter lab reports and papers, to determine which of the 50 people applying for a job actually knows anything about chemical engineering? Also where will these potential employees get the lab equipment needed to conduct the experiments necessary to produce this work to put up on the internet?

If there's 50 qualified candidates, then about 3 hours. They will just scan them, and pick the student who's work seems the best fit / highest quality / whatever.

If there's 49 useless candidates, and 1 good one, a similar amount of time. It doesn't take long to spot a sub-par paper, especially if the students have an incentive to be very clear about what they have done.

Bingo. Accreditation-on-demand is the second half of the puzzle.

One interesting solution is that offered by Western Governors University (created by 19 governors of western US states). It's non-profit, online, low-cost, and... "nationally, regionally, NCATE, and CCNE accredited."

They have a low, flat-rate tutition per term, regardless of how many courses or credits you take. Most interesting of all (I think), they mainly care about what you know, not how much time you spend with WGU: if you already know something, you can get "assessed" (e.g. tested) and move through the program faster.

http://www.wgu.edu/about_WGU/WGU_different

http://www.wikiversity.org is trying to head down that sort of route.

May the best teachers win: www.forgetthetextbook.com

$495 for 12 videos about why you should think outside the box? I dunno man...

And for your $495, you don't even get to download keep the videos. You get to view them for 6 month. I guess if I want to review them again next year I'm out an additional $495.

I was totally stoked when I read about the concept, but $40 a video for time limited streaming just made the whole thing a lot less interesting.

There is a big opportunity here, because higher education seems to be facing a crisis. Due to big increases in the costs of university education, combined with the reasonable reticence of students to take on large amounts of debt which may take decades to repay, for the first time it seems possible that the next generation may be less well educated than their parents - unless something changes.

per ampliora ad altiora = from breadth to depth

Oh interesting, great motto. They should definitely make that a mouseover or include it below it.

Can "per" mean "from"? It usually means "through".

You're right, it's "through" not "from". I can't edit it now.

I'm pretty sure the literal meaning of altiora (cf. altitude) is height. Of course, depth and height have very similar connotations when applied to intellectual pursuits. The breadth/depth pairing is more idiomatic in English, but my reading of the metaphor is that it suggests a wide, solid foundation is needed as the base of a towering structure. Or I could be totally off. :)

"altus" is an adjective and can mean both high and deep, depending on context. The literal meaning of the phrase is "Through wider things to higher/deeper things." "Through breadth to depth" is pretty close to that.

Website seems down, here's a cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Interesting. Although I wonder why the topics are so heavily biased toward the humanities... One would think that a view of the sciences would be equally important.

Probably because Khan Academy is heavily biased towards mathematics and OCW heavily biased towards science/engineering.

But Khan is basically only high school level material, and doesn't really compete or overlap with anything offering university level courses.

True, but there's nothing that keeps it from expanding higher and it has all the resources for it already in place. I'd think Khan Academy is likely to slowly become the major mathematics provider. Possibly also finance, depends on whether they expand those sections.

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