A degree from a screen?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As more of daily life gets taken over by technology, we ask what technology’s place is in the future of education. Pearson, the world's largest education publisher for example has just announced that it plans to phase out physical books, and adopt a "digital first" strategy.
So will lectures of the future be conducted purely on a virtual screen, with professors and students interacting digitally across hundreds or even thousands of miles? Ben Nelson, chief executive of the Minerva Project, an online learning project, thinks so. But Princeton historian Kevin Kruse is not convinced. He tells Ed Butler how he has had to deal with the dark side of “education” on the internet.
Also in the show, Oliver Thorn delivers philosophy education and entertainment on his YouTube channel Philosophy Tube. While "study-tuber" Ruby Granger can help you, and her 350,000 other subscribers, with revision.
(Picture: A female student lying in bed, holding a coffee mug and looking at her tablet computer; Credit: FatCamera/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:06.2 | Coming up, the spreading use of online study aids to transform what universities teach. |
| 0:13.0 | I do tell people like I give away my degree because that's why I started the show is when the government triple tuition fees. |
| 0:18.8 | I thought that's really unfair, so I'm just going to give away what I've learned for free online. |
| 0:22.5 | From YouTube to digital classrooms, the internet is challenging old models, but can it really be better than traditional university education? |
| 0:31.1 | Universities have nothing to do with education. They have everything to do with the quality of research. |
| 0:37.0 | They have been decoupled from |
| 0:39.5 | what society relies on universities for. That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:47.5 | In all the talk of digital disruption in the modern age is university education one of the last |
| 0:54.1 | great institutions that's resisting |
| 0:56.7 | reform? At it time we rethought the way that we tutor and train the brightest and the best among our |
| 1:03.0 | young people. Well, maybe. Over the years, I've spoken to quite a few educators, evangelising the |
| 1:08.3 | potential of what's called ed tech, the meeting of education and technology. |
| 1:13.8 | Consider the poor world, for example, where under-resourced teaching is a growing impediment these |
| 1:18.8 | days to development. Sal Khan runs a U.S.-based digital education platform called the Khan Academy. |
| 1:26.5 | I could imagine that if you're in a village in someplace in Africa or India, you could learn a lot of your core skills, especially in the STEM subject, and then you could prove it. |
| 1:35.9 | It frees up class time to do the richer things like, you know, if you're in math, to do proofs, if you're in writing, to get peer feedback, if you're in a history to have a |
| 1:44.7 | Socratic dialogue. But I also think those things we can start to experiment virtually as well. |
| 1:49.2 | You know, you have things like Google Hangout and Skype now. The virtual, computers, digital, |
| 1:53.5 | whatever you want to call it, actually in my mind has a chance of making the experience more |
| 1:56.9 | human. You're going to have more personalization and really being able to cater the education |
| 2:01.2 | to your individual needs. And yet for all the promise of technology, how much has actually changed |
... |
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