Another Article about the Transformation of American Higher Education
September 4th, 2009Articles about transformations in higher education are being published daily, it seems. Many of them focus on affordability and the fact that the increasing costs in higher education in the United States cannot continue to exceed inflation or the increase in earning power of Americans. Very few of these articles, however, offer solutions or examples of solutions to the high cost conundrum.
In the September issue of Fast Company Magazine, Anya Kamenetz writes an interesting article entitled “How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education.” She begins the article by discussing how the internet and various applications or sites such as Google, YouTube Edu, iTunesU, Wikipedia, and Facebook have changed the way all of us share information.
Yet while colleges like MIT have placed all of their coursework online for free, an MIT degree costs about $189,000. She cites Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at the University of Mary Washington as stating, “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies.” According to Kamenetz, Groom coined the term “edupunk” to describe the high-tech do-it-yourself education.
