College Future and Technology: Minerva Project

Inroduction

Graeme Wood writes about the Minerva project, an innovative university which has offices and a dorm in San Francisco. Graeme wood discusses how the Minerva project aims at taking education into future by engaging in the online education program. Minerva project involves a University that provide online education and an innovative center. In Minerva, students access the massive online courses by applying and paying the tuition fee which is about $28,000 annually.

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Summary

The university does not invest in the buildings, football teams, libraries and any other kind of physical education facilities. Ben Nelson was the founder of Minerva with an aim to offer an elite college experience and offers competition to other schools and institutions of a higher level. It has a hope of growing as the years goes by and move to other cities globally.

The writer expresses how education in the United States is regarded as being envied by the world but can also be faced with tremendous challenges. The major problem that faces the education is the financial problem as wood writes, especially by "financial dysfunction." In about a half a millennium, the technology in the learning sector has become hard in making changes. Wood explains that we can easily tell how university looked like 500 years by walking into a lecture hall in any university today. If you give a little imagination of today's lectures, a professor speaking in Latin and putting on a monk's cowl, it will give you exactly an image of how university looked like in some decades ago.

The article talks about the common tradition format of a class where a professor stands in front of a class and talk. Students have been subjected to lectures for many years now though we have no substantive evidence that this is the best method to teach. Wood describes how Minerva is in business to make profits as shown by its business plan, educational philosophy, urge for expansion and the ways it plans to succeed or fail.

As wood looked at Minerva and its operations, he concludes that at some point some of the functions of universities will be irrelevant as information is now everywhere. Wood explains how important it was to learn Latin before books got translated into other major languages. Students used to see a need to gather to attend lectures in person was a requirement for higher learning. But in this period, books are available and serviceable in online lectures by learned experts. Minerva is in its early stages of implementation, but the article shows that the traditional higher learning institutions are already in panic mode.

Response

The writer tries to explain the future of university education by using Minerva project. Wood tries to explain how online lectures plans to replace the traditional lectures halls and physical lectures with online classes. Wood explain in his article that Minerva University believes that online courses are an effective and efficient way of learning which I agree with him. An analysis that was published by United States Department of education in the year 2010 shows that students taking online courses performed better than those attending a face to face class. From the article, I believe it tells us online education can be effective in the future colleges. From the article, I can tell that online courses can be effective if work is dedicated to this field.

In this response, I am not trying to criticize the traditional classroom, but from the article, we can see that some of the expenses of traditional classroom need to be done away with. Online courses do not need physical structures such as classrooms and offices. In many years a lot of funds have been going to building sector but taking online courses can make this a thing of the past. traveling overseas in search of education can also be a little bit expensive, but online education can be a solution to this.

Information is now available everywhere and can be accessed online with the help of websites. Unlike the Latin time which requires one to learn the language first by gathering in some classroom, the information is now available in multilingual on websites. This makes it easier for anyone to take online classes from all parts of the globe as long as they have registered and paid the tuition fee.

In the article, Lewis explained how Minerva challenges the education field to return to the first principles. In one of his possibilities, he saw that Minerva would fail just because college degree for all intellectuals needs a liberal education in raising thoughtful individuals. Physical structures such as the alumni club where an individual creates networks may be missing. The article shows that there is no alumni club in Minerva which makes it look naive, making traditional classroom gain more odds. But in another sense, Minerva offer something that is more the same as liberal education to the entire world population who are currently facing a challenge of choosing between the possibility of joining the traditional United States schools and the education available in their country. Minerva solves such dilemmas by providing the education they needed to seek overseas in the comfort of their cities.

Conclusion

From this article, we can see that there is a possibility of elimination of lectures. In about 20 years to come, Minerva will enroll more students globally than any other institution of higher learning in the United States. In this time elite universities will adopt the Minerva idea of learning methods, where professors will be separated geographically but connected by technology that will do away with student-teacher physical interactions. Innovative online education has become as this is going to be the future of the college education that will change the notion that today education system looks exactly like the way it was 500 years ago.