The Way to Fail in San Jose
August 19, 2013
When reading the San Francisco Gate’s article, “San Jose State Suspends Online Courses” our immediate reaction was “ouch!” Many public universities in the US offer online courses as an alternative to traditional face-to-face education. San Jose University offered five online classes and more than half of the enrolled students failed them. In response, the university suspended classes for the time being to reevaluate. This does not mean San Jose University will stop offering online courses; it will just stop classes from Udacity. The failing classes were part of the “Massive Open Online Courses” strategy that incorporated major public universities to increase their online class offerings. These five failures set the plan back, but it is not deemed a waste:
“Despite the high failure rate, Sebastian Thrun, a researcher at Stanford University and Google Inc. who launched Udacity said valuable data and experience were gained from the effort, which will help improve future classes. ‘We are experimenting and learning. That to me is a positive,’ Thrun said. The school and Udacity plan to look into providing more information about the syllabus at the beginning of the class, so students are better informed about the requirements before committing. Officials also want to look at whether the online semester should be longer than traditional school terms to provide students with more flexibility.”
Most of the students in these classes were non-traditional students, working a job and little college experience, which is probably why they failed. It was a learning experience for both students and the university. Both are learning from their mistakes.
Whitney Grace, August 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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