How might a college course be conducted on Facebook?
If you're using Blackboard or eCollege, you know what a learning management system is, and how it's used. So visualize FaceBook as a learning management system. Each student logs into Facebook with an authentication device. Each of his or her professors and courses are already listed among the favorites on his or her personal page and can attend each class from there. Meanwhile the instructor is posting weekly discussion questions, homework assignments, team projects, quizzes and exams on his or her pages. Everyone has an instant messenger and a variety of blogs at their disposal.
What other social networking sites may be as suitable as Facebook for collegiate instruction?
All of them! MySpace. LinkedIn. PerfSpot.
I launched it in March to put those theories into practice. We started with one survey course, Tech 100, and one handpicked student. Based on initial traffic at our website, we expect 100 students by August and 1,000 by December. I plan to seek both regional and national accreditation.
What will be your pricing model?
All courses are free of charge and open to the general public. If a student wants to begin a transcript and earn academic credit, there is a $99 per month membership fee. Our roots are in social networking, remember. The texts in use are all free or open source.
How and where do you obtain free textbooks?
Two pioneers are making them available. One is
FreeloadPress.com. The other is
FlatWorldKnowledge.com. Your readers will want to know about both of them. As a matter of fact, FlatWorldKnowledge raised more than eight million dollars last week in venture funding. They both have an interesting wiki-like approach to textbooks that college professors will find very attractive. Free tuition and free books are crucial to my desire to educate people of all incomes throughout the world.
What might that mean for companies like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Angel?
I hoped you would ask. Their demise is on the horizon. Their products are inflexible. They operate with closed software systems that require intensive labor and significant royalties for interconnection. That's been eclipsed already in an interconnected world. If you own an iPhone, you know there are free apps available to all users that require no interconnection labor or royalties. They are immensely popular and widely used.
Where do you want to be five years from now?
I would like to have a stake in the largest university in the world.