According to this source Christine Ortiz is taking a leave from her prestigious post as a professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to start a radical, new nonprofit university that she says will have no majors, no lectures, and no classrooms. The plan is to begin with a campus in the Boston area that she hopes will grow to about 10,000 students and 1,000 faculty members — about the size of MIT. And her long-term plan is to add more campuses in other cities as well. Many details about the new university are still undetermined, including serious financial backing that is necessary for huge project like this. I guess it would be accredited not just another way to learn online?
I wish her luck, but I have to say I find it hard to see how this model can be anything like an enriching and fun as a university focused around discussion of your work with tutors and your peers, face to face. This whole on-line thing strikes me as miserably one-dimensional and suited more to one-way "push" instruction, rather than the two-way "push-pull" process you need to grow thinking minds to maturity. But I expect I am out of date. I wonder what those under the age of 30 think about it.....
