An article at Mashable “In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero” doesn’t bode well for institutes for higher education. Universities are a different matter, as higher education used to be free in Germany and still is in countries like Sweden – also top students in any country. In the long run, costs will naturally decrease, but I don’t see language teachers being replaced by videos anytime soon. Also, lower costs don’t mean the price will fall as well – especially in education, a high price tag signals quality. Many of the courses universities offer though could be replaced by open source and keep down overall costs – readings first and foremost. Also, education could be introduced to a broader spectrum of the population, but then again, a certain mindset is neccessary to watch an MIT Video lecture about Classic Mechanics instead of a mundane Big Brother episode at Youtube.
A commenter argues that “automatization can go only so far” – but logical essays i.e. can’t be evaluated by a machine. Nevertheless, PearsonVue is attempting exactly that with the new Pearson Test of English. If it’s technically feasible, I don’t see a problem evaluating other forms of academic production as well, verbal or written.
Still, I’ve had the opportunity to both experience face2face as well as online courses: The biggest advantage is direct intellectual exchange between students working on a case – not doable with today’s tools. Many textbooks are definitely going to be free in the future, it’s just a long way. Education is certainly going to get cheaper – but as long as teachers need to be paid and class rooms needed for social interaction, institutes for higher education are not going to be able to offer completely free courses.
I’m at a great workshop today and yesterday, “Social Software @ Work” at HHU’s Schloss Mickeln in Duesseldorf. I didn’t have much opportunity to take part in such conferences – something that has to change! Dozens of like-minded people, from companies like BASF, Daimler and Siemens as well as Frauenhof researchers talking about web 2.0. Check out the speakers list and their publications.
I did it! After reading up on further education, thinking over my decision not to do a doctorate, but an MBA program and coming to the same conclusion once again, I started looking for business schools in the area. There are two local schools, FOM and DBS and a number of distance study programs like the ones from Akad and Open University. The latter was really tempting, but I wanted to sit with other students in one room and work on problems together. Since every student has several years of experience in his work field, the mix of experiences a group can offer is unparalleled and can’t possibly be reached by distance learning. The DBS has an English MBA program as well, but it hasn’t started yet for this year so I’m settling for the German one and might switch later one.
Money is scarce as always, so I applied for a scholarship – and obtained it! The first day of school is today. In the next 19 months, I’ll dive into the world of economics and business administration. See you December 2009.
It was on the horizon, one hour ago this made the news:
The company, which provides mostly English conversation courses, reportedly had liabilities of 43.9 billion yen and will be delisted from the Jasdaq Securities Exchange on Nov. 27. Nova had a 50% market share among foreign language schools in the financial year from April 2002 to March 2003, according to a government statistics cited on Nova’ s Web site.
After being in business since 1981, this is a major event for Japan’s English education market as NOVA was said to be the largest provider of language teaching services on the market. A Friend tells me that embassies are jumping in to help teachers who have been fired in the process and are now in financial distress. Several hundred thousand students are also probably never going to get their money back.
Steven Pinker, one of the brightest minds of our times gave a speech about the history of violence at the TED Talks in 2007, arguing that we live more peacefully with each other than ever before in human history. I’d like to agree, but the media coverage of every incident easily leads to the impression that the world has indeed gone down the drain and the outlook is grim. It’s 20 well invested minutes:
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has decided that Nova Corp., the nation’s largest English-language school chain, violated the Specified Commercial Transaction Law and ordered it to partially suspend business.
[...]
Nova has about 450,000 students, more than 60 percent of the nation’s English-language school students.
If 60% of a country’s English-language school students are taking courses at one school and Japanese’ test takers average TOEFL score is 65, it begs the question in how far NOVA can be hold accountable for such low results.
ETS is going to loose a lot of customers if they don’t expand their network capacity fast: The South Korean government might create a test of their own to depend less on TOEFL. It’ll take them a few years though, and even then, ETS has a head start of several decades in language tests and a couple of years in internet-based testforms. TOEFL is a global operation, involving thousands of people working hard for it for years.
Lee Yong-Tak (who has an English name like every English language learner in this country: his name is Paul), who has been appointed as country manager for South Korea on June 1st will need every help he can get to end the TOEFL crisis in South Korea. My advice: Four cities can’t possibly meet demand for the whole country, get every university and language school equipped with computers on board asap.
Googling about the matter, One Girl’s Journey caught my eye. The blog includes several helpful urls – if you’re thinking about an MBA, take a look.
Firstly, I registered at MBA.com. During registration, if you choose your country of origin, two form fields are grayed out if you’re not from the US. Being the curious guy that I am, I changed it to United States of America to see what those two fields are about. The first one was to designate your state of origin within the US, the second one though… If you are a U.S. citizen and are residing in the U.S., select your ethnic or racial identification. They’re not alone, a lot of sites do that – what for? Beside the usual suspects (African American, Asian American, White etc.) there were two selections, multiracial and multiethnic that made me think. On many websites, those two terms are used conterminously, but the difference is simple. The concept of race though is not clearly defined at all and problematic from its basic concept, which is probably why the usage of the term multiethnic is increasing.
Next thing is line is proving that I understand and speak English well enough. Since I’m a TOEFL test center manager myself, I’m not allowed to take the TOEFL – and I’m not going to quit my job just to be eligible to take it after three months of unemployment for a part-time MBA course that requires me to have the job I had to quit. There are alternatives though, IELTS for example, which is where I wanted to sign up. Surprisingly, I can’t do that online as with ETS, I have to print out the application form. So very 20th century.
