A new horizon: distance learning at GTS

With a lot of hard work and some great initiative from the administration and staff, it looks as though NT1 will be offered as a distance learning course at GTS this coming Michaelmas semester, the fall of 2011. NT1 is already a hybrid course on Moodle and by the fall, I will have put content driven mini-lectures into each module so that class time will be spent on implications, discussion and application in different formats. More soon as things take shape.

Speaking of education for all, here's a recent article from the Chronicle on University of the People.

UoPeople strives to serve the vast numbers of students who have no access to traditional higher education. Some can't afford it, or they live in countries where there are simply no good colleges to attend. Others live in rural areas, or identify with a culture, an ethnicity, or a gender that is excluded from public services.

UoPeople students pay an application fee of between $10 and $50 and must have a high-school diploma and be proficient in English. There are also small fees for grading final exams. Otherwise, it's free.

The university takes advantage of the growing body of free, open-access resources available online. Reshef made his fortune building for-profit higher-education businesses during the rise of the Internet, and he noticed a new culture of collaboration developing among young people who grew up in a wired world. So UoPeople relies heavily on peer-to-peer learning that takes place within a highly structured curriculum developed in part by volunteers. The university plans to award associate and bachelor's degrees, and it is now seeking American accreditation.

Rather than deploy the most sophisticated and expensive technology, UoPeople keeps it simple—everything happens asynchronously, in text only. As long as students can connect their laptops or mobile devices to a telecommunications network, somewhere, they can study and learn.