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Online U
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The most intriguing, and easily the most sophisticated, of the
ventures offering online professional education is UNext.com.
The company was founded by Andrew Rosenfield, a lawyer and legal
consultant, and Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist
at the University of Chicago, who hit on the idea of selling
online business courses to big companies eager to improve their
employees' skills. They understood that in order to market courseware
to top firms, they would need both the academic expertise and
the brand name of the elite business schools. They offered a
deal worth at least $20 million to founding institutions; and
in short order they had signed up Columbia, Chicago, Stanford
and Carnegie-Mellon Universities, as well as the London School
of Economics.
With this seal of academic approval in hand, UNext reached agreements
to market courses to AOL-Time Warner, Morgan Stanley, Merrill
Lynch, Barclays Bank and others. UNext has had courses up on
the Net since August; students can take either full-length courses
or minicourses that focus on specific skill areas. Like GEN,
UNext is targeting the adult learner, but students can also
accumulate credit toward a diploma from the company's own business
school, Cardean University. Rosenfield says that UNext is in
varying stages of negotiation to offer courses in Brazil, China,
India and elsewhere. Rosenfield, unlike Mark Taylor, wants to
make money, not rock boats. "We have no ambition to substitute
for physical colleges," he says. "We think they're
first best. But for many people and many places, that's just
not going to occur."
Ultimately, the online revolution will make us think differently
about the nature of the university. The university as we know
it now does many things: it creates courses and organizes them
into a curriculum, provides a physical setting for instruction
and implements a technology of instruction -- teachers in a
classroom. What if we break these apart? You'll still leave
Mom and Dad behind for four years at Gopher Junction College,
but rather than listen to the duds on Gopher's faculty, you'll
troll the Internet for courses; or maybe Gopher will furnish
the Cornell science curriculum, or the GEN European History
curriculum, with the school's own faculty serving as "learning
facilitators." Or maybe you'll stay at home and find a
college to serve as your formal credentialing body. Entire subjects
may be automated. In a recent issue of The Futurist, a professor
named Samuel L. Dunn pointed out that only 25 courses account
for 50 percent of total credit enrollment in American colleges,
and he predicted that "there will be 'killer applications'
for these 25 courses available by 2010." A villa in Provence
to the professor who comes up with the killer app for Psych
101.
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