Prolog OPINION
A little education is a wonderful thing, argues Harvard’s BARRY COLLINS
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train is careering out of control down a track and you’re in the signal box. If you don’t do anything, the train will plough straight into four people who are sitting at the end of the line and kill them all. If you pull a lever, the train will change track and kill only a single person. What do you do? Stand by and let four people perish, or intervene and save three lives? When faced with that choice, most people would say they’d pull the lever, in the interest of the greater good. But now let’s change the scenario slightly: the train is still ploughing towards the four people at the end of the track, but this time the only way to save them is to push a fat man over a bridge and halt the progress of the train before it reaches them. Now which do you choose? At this point you’re probably flicking to the front cover and checking you haven’t accidentally picked up a copy of Psychology Today. I apologise. Deep-thinking pieces aren’t my style: I usually leave the brainwork to Dick Pountain – this month, he’s diving into DNA’s relationship with computing on p63. I had to look up how to spell DNA. However, my relatively lightweight academic credentials – a respectable smattering of GCSEs and A-levels, and a degree from one of Britain’s middle-ranking ex-polytechnics – have been bolstered by a 12-week course at Harvard. You know, the Ivy League university where America sends its brightest minds, not former pupils of Essex comprehensives. The moral dilemmas posed above aren’t mine: they were used by Professor Michael Sandel to tease out which members of his audience were utilitarians (those who believe in sacrificing the rights of the minority in favour of the majority) and which were libertarians (people who think that we should never violate the rights of the individual, even if it would increase overall happiness). He used the examples in the first of a dozen fascinating, hour-long lectures on justice, which I “attended” from my home in Sussex – roughly 3,300 miles away from the Harvard campus – and without paying a cent in tuition fees. I took the course through the iTunes U app on my iPad, which offers hundreds of academic courses that vary in both topic (The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Science Behind The Bike and iPhone App Development, to name but three) and quality. Many are provided by renowned institutions such as Harvard, Oxford and the
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Open University, and the way the courses are packaged together is tremendous. I could watch Sandel deliver his lecture in full-screen mode, or tap a button and type notes with the onscreen keyboard, while the video continued to play in a thumbnail screen. Bundled with the videos are links to the course notes and further reading materials. Other courses use podcasts instead of video, but both are downloadable so you can watch on the train to work. It started me thinking, and about more than the ethics of shoving fat fellas under trains: is this type of distance learning that much worse than the education I received at university 15 years (sob) ago? Sure, I can’t ask questions live in the lecture theatre, but then neither can most of the 1,000 students in the room with Sandel at Harvard. Nor is there any personal tuition, but then I don’t remember a great deal when I was at university, either. The biggest difference between virtual and actual university courses is that – no matter how well I grasp the concepts Sandel is throwing at me – I won’t leave with a couple of letters after my name and Harvard on my CV.
Some online courses do offer accreditation, and the top-scoring students are being headhunted by companies such as Google However, other online courses do offer accreditation. Former Googler Sebastian Thrun, who worked on the company’s self-driving car (see p29), recently set up Udacity, an online university that offers courses in computer science. His course on artificial intelligence attracted 160,000 students, and at the end of the course they took the same exam as students from red-brick universities. More than 23,000 graduated, and the top-scoring students are being headhunted by companies such as Google. Could iTunes U, Udacity and a growing band of other online institutions (including OpenLearn, Khan Academy and Coursera) really compete with the great universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Hull?* When they’re charging thousands of pounds in course fees just to enrol in red-brick universities, you don’t need a master’s in economics, or a degree in psychology, to understand why students might be tempted.
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BARRY COLLINS is the editor of PC Pro. (*Only two of those are great universities. Oxford is a complete dump. With apologies to Blackadder.) Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/barryc Email: editor@pcpro.co.uk
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