Should-Read: Rick Levin: Toward Sustainable Financing of Higher Education

Should-Read: The problem is that nobody really knows—yet—how to accomplish the successful “scaling [of] faculty productivity through online education”. The people who can successfully take MOOCs—at least as they are currently organized and envisioned—are people who could perfectly well learn via sustained interaction with the Turing-class virtual instantiation of the thinker they could construct and run on their wetware—in other words, by reading and thinking about the book.

The fact that the lecture survived Gutenberg strongly suggests that that slice of the population—the successful MOOC-takers—is a relatively small fraction of even those who excel and strongly benefit from our current system of higher education.

Rick Levin: Toward Sustainable Financing of Higher Education: “In the face of rising costs of attendance and an escalating burden of student debt… http://www.cshe.berkeley.edu/events/toward-sustainable-financing-higher-education-0

…universities are under pressure to increase productivity and control costs.  This lecture offers three suggestions: (1) a novel framing of the argument for public support of universities, (2) conserving capital expenditures by proper accounting for the cost of facilities, and (3) scaling faculty productivity through online education…