Paul - Further comments on the EVAT committee Final Report
Educational Uses of the Web
Distance Learning (p. 15 of the printed version)
Strike "distance education is not now practical". Stanford has been
doing this for years. Please rephrase along the lines of the suggested
change I had for the executive summary.
page 20
Distance Education
Disagree that we are not "ideally suited". Actually, if the vision is
correct and that DE is possible for many institutions, we will have an
advantage due to our brand name. This is especially true for
international students. They will pay a premium price. I do agree that
we will probably not position ourselves as teaching basic courses to
undergraduates. I do think, however, that we can and should do an
excellent job of delivering higher level material. Understandably, the
market for this is smaller -- however, since we offer this material
on-site anyway, the additional costs will be slight (relatively), and
the economies of scale will be great. And, besides the additional
revenue, there is the whole question of impact -- wouldn't it be great
if people from around the world could learn their advanced
science/engineering/etc from MIT? Isn't dissemination of knowledge half
of our basic mission? (The other half being creation of knowledge
through research.) How can we imagine that information technology is
not going to play a major role in that?
Next paragraph, I agree with Dick Larson that these three bullets are
insufficient, and prefer his list of half a dozen or more. I don't
think that we can prioritize these yet, given the lack of discussion
(and knowledge) on this topic. I also think we need to mention the SDM
program in this paragraph, along with the VI-As, as I mentioned in my
comments on the Exec. Summary.
page 22, Short Range Recommendations
in section 3, again, please use SDM as the example.
page 24 Medium range recommendations
point 7 seems the same as point 3 from the short range recommendations.
I think there needs to be something stronger here, like, "The 5 schools
of the institute should carefully evaluate the initial short range
experiments in distance education done by engineering and sloan and use
these results to offer one subject each [school] within the next five
years." (I'm assuming that 5 years is what the medium range is. Amend
my text as necessary if this assumption is incorrect.)
page 26
Long range
see my comments above about economics. clearly we don't want to offer
freshman anything, since that is a commodity product. we will always be
a high cost, high margin kind of institution. therefore, we should
offer the Lexus/Mercedes type of courses if we are to make a big impact,
and the Ferrari/Lamborghini type of courses if we want to say that we do
it, but don't want to invest a lot of resources in it. (i.e., think in
terms of market size. we dont want to offer freshman calculus, that's
the hyundai. offering our nobel prize economists is the mercedes, and
would be in demand not just at universities, but also in business (e.g.
wall street) and government. offering some esoteric theoretical science
course would be an elite product, but would only be attractive to a
small number of people at other universities who could use it. but
they'd pay for the access, and therefore it would be a ferrari.)
Chris