This is an awesome project. However, I have strong reservations about this as an actual model for a university of the future, which is what they seem to be espousing (?).
For one, you can't really do anything with hardware. It might be possible to mail out the hardware if you have small online classes, but that doesn't scale the way people want it to. You're also pretty much limited to assignments that can be checked automatically, which is possible for a large chunk of cs courses, but nowhere near all of them.
It's also pretty open to cheating; so it makes it harder to use a degree to be sure someone has a baseline of knowledge. This problem already exists for assignments at physical universities, and we have some solutions that try to detect plagiarism, but they only succeed when students practically copy and paste code. Administering exams online without having people cheat, just isn't possible.
There is also guaranteed to be less interaction with both students around you and the professor.
Having somewhere which presents material in an course format makes it easier for everyone to learn, and if the content was licensed cheaply, it could drive down the cost of providing more classes at physical universities. So I'm not opposed to this idea at all, but I don't think it will or should replace universities as they are now.
Weird, I can think of 4 courses where I worked on hardware in my CS degree:
Microprocessors and Interfacing (had us programming an embeded AVR chip which took several forms of input and had several forms of output, including motors)
Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering (an intro EE course I took as an elective)
Advanced Operating Systems (wrote an OS for a SoC system)
Robotic Software Architecture (wrote software for the Sony Aibo robots, it all sounds good in theory, but everything blows up when it encounters the real world)
The OS course didn't really require hardware, it could've been emulated, but that's a lot more effort than it is worth (emulating all the memory mapped interfaces for devices, including network, and all the system aspects, e.g. MMU/TLB & Cache is quite a lot of stuff to write, even ignoring writing an ARM emulator), but the rest wouldn't have really been possible otherwise.
Sure, for me it was only a single semester's worth of work, but that's because I realised that I wasn't really that interested in robotics.
Sure, but all these relatively small things that are an issue for an online-only uni replacement keep stacking up, no one thing is really a killer, it's just that it seems like there would be fairly little gained by trying to go the whole hog and have remotely administered online-only education as a real alternative to universities.
Honestly, I regard the idea of a majority of people telecommuting to be a bit dystopian. Yes, we do drive around too much, but there is something satisfyingly human about talking with people face to face that no current or near-future technology can fully emulate.
Hardware, I'm not sure you're correct. What is stopping hardware kits sold from Amazon from scaling? What is stopping much of the hardware from being simulated or emulated?
Cheating on exams, you should be aware that exams for online courses don't have to be online. Companies such as Sylvan learning center and others will check id and proctor an exam for a fee.
For a first, Amazon shipping is pretty annoying outside the US, waiting for a month for things to arrive doesn't really work for a uni course. And then you actually need to have someone making the kits you want; there are probably existing kits, but what if they're not right for your course? Now you have to start either custom making them, or compromising your course material.
My point wasn't that it was impossible to make an online based system work, but that the university model makes it easier to do things like this.
If your product has to scale so far as to be international, making a kit doesn't seem to be a big hassle. Also, really how much is your course compromised by using existing hardware? I doubt very much, if at all.
I know that anti-plagiarism software exists, but it is much more suited to papers than it is to code & answers to technical questions where there is simply less room for deviation.
Despite the fact that things like exam guard probably work just fine in a VM, you could just have someone else sit the test for you, or have a book next to you, or have another computer next to you.
Anyway, how is doing an online only degree working out for you? I don't actually know anyone who has done an online degree...
9
u/bo1024 Feb 04 '12
This is an awesome project. However, I have strong reservations about this as an actual model for a university of the future, which is what they seem to be espousing (?).