Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/education/26university.html?_r=1&ref=education
Date: Jan 25, 2009

“An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People… “The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” said the entrepreneur, Shai Reshef…“The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free… We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works….”

Attention Mr. Reshef, as an educator, as you are also, we are aware that peer-to-peer collaboration works, but the virdict for ”teaching” is still out.  And, the verdict for collaborative, peer-to-peer, instruction is even more bleak.  The reason for this is simply that social networking removes heirarchies that are a necessity for the disemination of correct information.  Education is not wikipedia, where we can teach incorrect information then hope that the “student” will recieve the correction down the road. 

This is the danger in “peer-to-peer” formats, where the participants are equals and the knowledge/truth factor is reduced to a relativistic stance.  While we may believe that this is not the case, observations of any discussion forum should open one’s eyes to the fact that there can be as much misinformation as correct information.  How are the students, who come into a subject with only a base knowledge of that area, to make sense of what is accurate and who is accurate vs. who is not accurate?

While it seems that the entrepreneur is making plans on how to account for this, the reality is that there is a huge difference between the process of learning in an online environment, and the tranformation of the content of that learning into a curricula with an end degree granting institution.  With that reality, my prediction is that without the focus on the learning process, and the current focus being upon the management of information, this endeavor will only become a second rate University of Phoenix.  Last, my “hunch” is based upon the fact that Mr. Reshef is the current chairman of cramster.com, a site that falls quite short of the security & accuracy concerns mentioned above.

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