Harvard, Yale, and Bard Back 'Floating University' That Showcases Scholars' Online Lectures - Wired Campus

Harvard, Yale, and Bard Back ‘Floating University’ That Showcases Scholars’ Online Lectures

July 29, 2011, 6:51 pm

Could you distill your entire field into an hourlong presentation?

Some leading scholars are taking up that challenge in a for-profit educational video venture that debuts next month.

It’s called the Floating University. The project’s first production is a course called “Great Big Ideas: An Entire Undergraduate Education While Standing on One Foot.” The survey course features 14 video lectures from scholars like Yale’s Paul Bloom (psychology); CUNY’s Michio Kaku (physics); Berkeley’s Deborah Nolan (statistics); Bard’s Leon Botstein (art); and Harvard’s Steven Pinker (linguistics). There’s also material on biomedicine, classics, sociology, economics, and politics. Three institutions—Harvard, Yale, and Bard—are offering the survey course for credit to incoming freshmen this fall, with the videos and related readings serving as prompts for in-class discussions.

The project is a collaboration between the ideas Web site Big Think and the Jack Parker Corporation, a New York real-estate-development company. It faces competition from other educational-video providers, like TED, TeacherTube, and even YouTube. And there’s already a course in “Big History,” backed by Bill Gates. But Adam Glick, Jack Parker’s president, hopes his “Floating University” will stand out because of its production quality, with graphics, animations, and multiple camera angles. His plan is to license the materials to educational institutions and to sell “Great Big Ideas” subscriptions to the general public. The price of those subscriptions is still undetermined, but a spokeswoman ballparked it at “under $500.”

The roots of this project go back to Mr. Glick’s job running a real-estate company and an investment portfolio. He wanted to hire employees with broad general knowledge, he says, but struggled to find them. And disciplinary silos prevent universities from creating courses that sprawl across so much intellectual turf, he argues.

“It’s very, very difficult politically to have a course that involves 12 different professors,” Mr. Glick says. “So we did it for them.”

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richardtaborgreene

Only Harvard would be shallow enough to do something like this. Psychopaths have judgment problems (but not theft problems).
richardtaborgreene

just what we need “pop” ideas!
electronicmuse

Experts giving us their quintessence . . . if this is “pop,” then the more the better!

What we have as academics is our interactions with our colleagues, we surely don’t do it to get rich. Even such limited exposures to “ideas worth spreading” (a la TED) as these might prove useful . . . even if one has to pay.
mlackey

This sounds an awful lot like those lectures on CD that you see advertised in Smithsonian and The New Yorker, promising you the best of Western Civilization for just a few hundred dollars. I have no objection to them as entertainment.
http://hiresteve.com/ Steve Foerster

There are already plenty of fascinating lectures available online as open educational resources. Why pay these guys five hundred bucks for a series of them when you can roll your own for free?
ralfjritter

This sounds a lot like paid-PR, except that those subscribing will be paying. These lectures will generate extra cash for the institutions. I would like them to launch this for free — that in itself would be beneficial to the schools, but perhaps they think they don’t need good PR.
frisina

It may be difficult to “have a course that involves 12 different professors” but it is being done at many institutions, my own included. In Hofstra University’s Honors College we’ve been running a lecture/discussion course with 12 faculty in the humanities and social sciences for some 10 years now. What the video strategy can’t quite do is generate among a group of a students the sense that they are participating members in a community-wide large scale intellectual project. There’s something about sitting together in the lecture hall with fellow students and 12 of your faculty that creates the kind of surplus feeling that Durkheim thought essential to community life. I’m not opposed to videos, of course. But like all performances there is something electric about the energy flowing between a great lecturer and her or his audience. Want proof? Watch a video presentation of a concert you’ve attended. The two are just not the same. The video isn’t bad, or wrong. But it’s not going to generate the kind of energy you got from being there with others who were both enjoying but also participating in the moment.
vicky_phillips

More quality educational video is a great idea but this project shows little understanding of what it is a general consumer marketplace is willing to pay for in terms of an education.

Lectures from the Ivy League do well as free open source courseware … but the public won’t pay for them bcs the public is not by and large looking for intellectual stimulation or leisure learning about BIG IDEAS. This concept has been tried and has failed as a commercial venture time and time again. It’s like trying to get people to pay to subscribe to PBS.

Students go to Ivy League schools primarily for the prestige and to make social connections — look at the studies on this from Pew and others — put Ivy League courses online and NEITHER of these valued commodities (prestige or social connections) — come along for the ride.

There is no reliable business model behind this venture. Ivy League schools are very focused on themselves and their exclusivity. They need a course in online education and marketing 101 to understand how they fit in the new higher education order.

Vicky Phillips
GetEducated.com
laundrydishes

A for-profit institution that may henceforth be known through the initialism FU.

Is irony a great big idea?