Il futuro delle università, in rete

Il numero del New Yorker in edicola ha un lungo articolo sui MOOC e il futuro delle università, in rete.

In the mid-nineteen-sixties, two economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, diagnosed a “cost disease” in industries like education, and the theory continues to inform thinking about pressure in the system. Usually, as wages rise within an industry, productivity does, too. But a Harvard lecture hall still holds about the same number of students it held a century ago, and the usual means of increasing efficiency—implementing advances in technology, speeding the process up, doing more at once—haven’t seemed to apply when the goal is turning callow eighteen-year-olds into educated men and women. […]

Bowen spent much of the seventies and eighties as the president of Princeton, after which he joined the Mellon Foundation. In a lecture series at Stanford last year, he argued that online education may provide a cure for the disease he diagnosed almost half a century ago.

Per approfondire, suggerisco di leggere le riflessioni di Clay Shirky sul tema.