Here's the news blurb:
Starbucks Corp. will provide a free, online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce Monday.
The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 US employees who work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the cost. But even for many of them, courses will be free when government and university aid is included.
I expect ed bloggers and commentators to start a firestorm in 3 ... 2... 1 ...
But can you really Tivo an entire education? I don't think so. Real education involves give-and-take, interaction, mentorship, practice, and a whole host of other things. You can maybe Tivo lectures, but lectures alone do not a real education make.
From Hong Kong to the world:
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have largely been an American innovation thus far. Europe has one or two small programs, but in Asia there are none at all—until now, that is.
University World News reports that the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is now offering a class through Coursera, making it the first Asian school to offer its own MOOC coursework. “Society, Technology and Culture in China” is taught in English, and the majority of its 17,000 students are located in the West. Two more Asian universities are planning to follow HKUST’s lead, and Coursera is looking to develop a Chinese-language platform linked to universities in Taiwan and Hong Kong as part of what appears to be a serious push to gain a foothold in the growing Chinese market.
Here's the announcement from December 2011, and here is the website for the free courses. Thanks, MIT! Here's a nice quote from MIT President Susan Hockfield:
“MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”
