“It’s cool to be a drop out these days.“ ... “It’s the dying companies that value college degrees. You have to think beyond that piece of paper.”

-> A College Education on the Cheap? Tech Start-Ups Take on Higher Ed is a short read from CNBC.com. The reporter speaks with Sebastian Thrun of Udacity (formerly of Stanford) and Eren Bali of Udemy. Toward the end of the interview, Thrun makes the point that—education aside—what these large, freely offered MOOC-type course offerings may do really well is act as a search engine for intellectual and creative talent that might otherwise never have a chance to be recognized:

“It’s not necessarily about educating, but discovering,” Thrun says, “We can reach and then develop talent that most universities cannot.”

Hmm. MITx may well be MIT’s way of doing the same thing. What do you think? 

Related opportunity. Note that the theme of the January–March 2013 issue of Planning for Higher Education will be Change-Disruption. If you know of someone who could write credibly about these topics throughout a campus’ integrated planning processes, or from a unique perspective, please suggest authors to Planning’s managing editor, claire.turcotte@scup.org. We’ll be looking for articles, planning stories, bloggers, and more. Insights as to what these MOOCs and new for-profit enterprises might do to our planning environment are welcome.

We don't doubt that "social learning" tools are either going to prove useful and popular or the equivalent functionality will eventually just be built into a student or a faculty member's tool kit for teaching and learning.

This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Marc Parry and Jeffrey R. Young discusses the concept, one early failure, and then takes a look at four of what the authors consider to be the most interesting new tools available for use: FinalsClub, OpenStudy, GradeGuru, and Mixable.

The comments below the article are interesting, if predictable:

I agree with drfunz. Students are being co-opted by companies/sites like Facebook that claim to link them globally in an instant--like a party all the time. The reality is that many of these sites depend on dollars from advertisers who depend on number of hits. Eventually, it all falls down. Look at Wikipedia who has its founder pictured above the entry, flogging for money to support a "social research" site. That comes now after years of teachers saying that Wikipedia is nothing more than a superficial knowledge site for those who don't know ANYTHING about the topic and banning it as a real source of research.

Teachers who immediately run to social network sites because that is where the students go are often only doing two things: wanting to show the students they are hip and cool, and therefore worthy of respect, OR letting the tail wag the dog--letting student habits dictate pedagogy. "Just in time" is a phrase that applies to shipments of goods, not learning. Students who learn "just in time" by looking it up, carrying PowerPoint sheets into tests, and only doing online research will forget that information very quickly--often before the test or paper due the next day. It's basic psychology: short term memory can only hold 7 items +/- 2 for 30 seconds. The only way to get it into longterm memory is to practice, restate, review--none of the processes that are part of the "click click" computer generation.