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Horses for courses

Horses for courses Roger c.s~hankl Vi ewpoi nt Horses For Courses niversities are scrambling to get into the distance-education business. They see the computer as vital to this enterprise, but it ™s not obvious why it ™s vital. We do know that, idealistically, they want to deliver courses via the Web. There are a few obvious reasons why a university might want to offer virtual courses, reasons ranging from additional student revenue to the exploration of new teaching methods, although I seriously doubt the latter is high on any university president ™s mind. What ™s really going on has nothing to do with computers. Everyone is concerned that if Harvard ever got its act together and delivered every Harvard course via videotaped lectures and developed some way to interact with the professors, everyone else would be out of business. Of course, Harvard isn ™t going to do this because, well, Harvard is Harvard. But what if some other very reputable and less stufQ place decided to give it a try? Would anyone go to Contra Costa Junior College if Virtual Harvard were available for the same price, convenient to your schedule? I ™m not worried about Virtual Harvard. But what I http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Communications of the ACM Association for Computing Machinery

Horses for courses

Schank, Roger C.
Communications of the ACM , Volume 41 (7) – Jul 1, 1998
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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0001-0782
DOI
10.1145/278476.278482
Publisher site
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Abstract

Roger c.s~hankl Vi ewpoi nt Horses For Courses niversities are scrambling to get into the distance-education business. They see the computer as vital to this enterprise, but it ™s not obvious why it ™s vital. We do know that, idealistically, they want to deliver courses via the Web. There are a few obvious reasons why a university might want to offer virtual courses, reasons ranging from additional student revenue to the exploration of new teaching methods, although I seriously doubt the latter is high on any university president ™s mind. What ™s really going on has nothing to do with computers. Everyone is concerned that if Harvard ever got its act together and delivered every Harvard course via videotaped lectures and developed some way to interact with the professors, everyone else would be out of business. Of course, Harvard isn ™t going to do this because, well, Harvard is Harvard. But what if some other very reputable and less stufQ place decided to give it a try? Would anyone go to Contra Costa Junior College if Virtual Harvard were available for the same price, convenient to your schedule? I ™m not worried about Virtual Harvard. But what I

Journal

Communications of the ACM – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jul 1, 1998

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