Traditional education may be a dinosaur since the rise of Google. People point to enrollment stats to say it ain’t so, but this misses the fact that traditional universities have had to radically alter their existing premises in order to adapt, and offer courses in ways they claimed, early on, were a threat to education itself. Now instead of saying the internet will destroy education, they’re on an l-curve of riding the bandwidth bandwagon. They’re giving cloud courses with an enthusiasm once reserved for stodgy lectures two centuries ago, or research in the previous century. Relevance is now in being remote. Video didn’t so much as “kill the radio star” as force it to evolve.
We’d been talking about this on FAS-TV, and then came across this from the Floating University’s FAQ:
What is the idea or concept behind Floating University?
The concept of a modern university as the nexus of research and teaching is no longer relevant in a world of Google and Yahoo! where all of the world’s information is available at the click of a mouse. A new era has been ushered in. As the best teachers are now producing coursework that they can license independently of the institutions where they reside, our idea was to bring these courses to everyone, everywhere, anytime. The freedom that comes from this is nothing less than revolutionary.How do you get the best minds and leading scholars to participate in your lectures?
We presented each lecturer with a challenge: Tell us everything a non-professional needs to know about your subject in less than 60 minutes. What results is a multi-media presentation, produced with the highest quality video and graphics that is ultimately focused, engaging, intelligent and provocative.
In the same way, we believe companies that base talent on traditional employment or else make due with regular staffing agencies, are about to face more agile, effective, and scalable competition from startups and small businesses who aren’t clinging to the traditional hallowed hallways of standard employment. We think the concept of employment that is both floating and sustainable, independent yet still meets corporate or company needs for long-term projects, is about to force the ecosystem to change.
