Colleges are already broadcasting campus news and emergency bulletins to students’ cellphones. So why not try and teach some courses over the devices too?
Truth be told, there are plenty of reasons not to do that. Cellphones are hardly ideal vehicles for most course material, and there’s no reason to believe that students actually want course work to impinge upon text messaging (or vice versa). But that hasn’t stopped Cyber University, a Japanese distance-ed institution, from offering what may be the world’s first cellphone-based college course.
The course — which surveys the mysteries of the pyramids, according to the Associated Press — will be delivered through a series of recorded lectures, which are accompanied by PowerPoint images that fill up tiny phone screens.
If this all sounds like an attention-getting gimmick, well, that’s basically what it is. Enrollment is open to the public, but course lectures can only be viewed on phones manufactured by Softbank, a Japanese carrier that owns a majority share of the online university, it just so happens. —Brock Read
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