As is inevitable, and predicted here for years now, higher education is being disrupted by various new forms that try to, as PSA does, start over from the ground up based on asking questions such as “What is Learning”, and “What does it mean to be educated”. Kind of like when Orville and Wilbur were asking, “What is manned flight?”, and “What does it take to stay airborne?”
There will be many attempts to answer the question of what is the future of learning using new communication tools. Here’s one venture cap funded conception, from an article in The Atlantic. Brings up some fundamentally important questions to ask. Highly recommended.
A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by stripping it down to its essence, eliminating lectures and tenure along with football games, ivy-covered buildings, and research libraries. What if he’s right?
But the key to Minerva, what sets it apart most jarringly from traditional universities, is a proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
Here’s a link from Slate doing a story on the Atlantic story, and on Minerva.