Peterson may be an academic, but he’s dispensing with the academy’s constraints. His university salary is around $128,000; that now looks modest beside the $1m a year he receives in crowdfunding via the site Patreon, in return for YouTube Q&As. Traditional universities charge “unforgivable” fees, and “haven’t got a hope of surviving in their present form”, he says. He has hired three people to work on a proposal for a new online university — “user-funded at the lowest possible cost, but also crowdsourced in terms of its operation”. He is in touch with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who urges undergraduates to drop out. There’s a blurred line between the thinker and the salesman, and Peterson has crossed it.
Goddamn it Peter Thiel
It’s totally poisoned because Peterson is tied to it.
But the online university thing might not be a bad idea. You could probably replace quite a bit of the operation of a modern university for lecture-based subjects with a mix of pre-recorded videos, and decentralized discussion with other students, and “crowdsourced” operation that relies on offloading some tasks to students.
Probably the biggest issues would be to sell it as something that people consider reputable (a number of purely online universities exist and have lower costs, but they have issues building a reputation), and dealing with things like arranging for securely proctored tests.
When you say that test proctoring would be a big issue, do you mean you think it would be a big issue for online universities *in general*, or specifically a problem for online universities who are aiming to destroy the old tertiary-education system (rather than just adding more options to it)?
My university technically has a corporeal campus, but I’ve never been there and neither have the vast majority of the other students. They have standing arrangements with a bunch of universities, community colleges, and…*looks at list*…huh, libraries too, maybe you *could* make this system work even if you’re trying to end all corporeal campuses (and so don’t want a system dependent on them continuing to exist). Anyway, they have standing arrangements with a bunch of places across the country to host the exams of the local students. My local community college charges the student a $30/exam hosting fee (to compensate for increasing their proctor’s workload and such), but other than that it’s really a non-issue.
(The computerised exams also have an option to have somebody watch you over a webcam, but I’ve never tried that.)
(now if only my university would join the reciprocal college Internet system, because as it stands I’m not allowed to use the Wi-Fi at *my own exam centre*, and it makes coordinating with my ride a lot trickier. but that’s another matter.)
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I see people sometimes who think that exam proctoring is some massive obstacle that online universities will soon face and probably fail to overcome, and it’s like…
One time I read an article about how self-driving cars on public roads would be a disaster, because–not being able to make eye contact with the driver–pedestrians would have no way of knowing whether the car had noticed them and would stop for them, and the car and pedestrian would get into standoffs where neither was willing to risk moving forward (or, worse, *both* of them gave up waiting for the other at the same time). The writer appeared to think that this was insurmountable and would destroy all public goodwill towards self-driving cars.
A few months previously, I’d seen a news clip about a self-driving-car prototype with a smiley-face-shaped light on the front, which it lights up while stopping for a pedestrian in order to let the pedestrian know they’ve been noticed.
The way I felt reading that self-driving-car article is how I feel when people say online-university exam proctoring is a huge issue. The doom they are just now getting around to foretelling has already been noticed and averted, and without anywhere near as much difficulty as they think it’s going to take.
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