Yesterday I suggested that we need to move to a competency-based approach to general education while providing the various introductory courses on our campuses for free to our students. What would that look like in reality? If we start thinking about the university (or college) as an aggregator and re-distributor of knowledge and skills (as…
Tag: Academic Commons
The End of Western Civilization as We Know It (cont’d)
Over the past few days I’ve been writing about what the free economy might mean for higher education in the United States. My main proposal is that we ought to start giving away the required courses in the general education curriculum. Here at George Mason that would mean 40 credits, or one-third of the credits…
The End of Western Civilization as We Know It (cont’d)
In yesterday’s post I argued that it was time for American colleges and universities to take seriously the idea that we ought to start giving away our general education curriculum via various online content delivery systems. There are three principle objections I can think of to why giving away the general education curriculum is a…
The End of Western Civilization as We Know It (cont’d)
In yesterday’s post I wrote about how the “race to the bottom” in the free economy of the Internet was changing the way that American (and global) companies do business in many sectors. Today I want to speculate on what that will mean for American higher education–an industry that ignores market forces at its peril….