8/13/2019 PC Pro column, issue 220

1/1www.pcpro.co.uk 007PC PROFEBRUARY2013

Prolog OPINION

Some online courses do offer accreditation,and the top-scoring students are beingheadhunted by companies such as Google

A little education is a

wonderful thing, arguesHarvards BARRY COLLINS

BARRY COLLINSis the editor of PC Pro. (*Onlytwo of those are great universities. Oxford is a

complete dump. With apologies to Blackadder.)

Blog:www.pcpro.co.uk/links/barryc

Email:editor@pcpro.co.uk

Atrain is careering out of control

down a track and youre in thesignal box. If you dont do

anything, the train will plough

straight into four people who are

sitting at the end of the line and kill them all. If

you pull a lever, the train will change track andkill only a single person. What do you do?

Stand by and let four people perish, or interveneand save three lives?

When faced with that choice, most people

would say theyd pull the lever, in the interestof the greater good. But now lets change the

scenario slightly: the train is still ploughing

towards the four people at the end of the track,

but this time the only way to save them is to

push a fat man over a bridge and halt theprogress of the train before it reaches them.

Now which do you choose?

At this point youre probably flicking to

the front cover and checking you haventaccidentally picked up a copy of Psychology

Today. I apologise. Deep-thinking pieces arentmy style: I usually leave the brainwork to Dick

Pountain this month, hes diving into DNAs

relationship with computing on p63. I had tolook up how to spell DNA.

However, my relatively lightweight academic

credentials a respectable smattering of GCSEs

and A-levels, and a degree from one of Britains

middle-ranking ex-polytechnics have beenbolstered by a 12-week course at Harvard. You

know, the Ivy League university where America

sends its brightest minds, not former pupils of

Essex comprehensives.

The moral dilemmas posed above arent

mine: they were used by Professor MichaelSandel to tease out which members of his

audience were utilitarians (those who believe

in sacrificing the rights of the minority in favour

of the majority) and which were libertarians(people who think that we should never violate

the rights of the individual, even if it would

increase overall happiness). He used the

examples in the first of a dozen fascinating,

hour-long lectures on justice, which I attendedfrom my home in Sussex roughly 3,300 miles

away from the Harvard campus and without

paying a cent in tuition fees.

I took the course through the iTunes U appon my iPad, which offers hundreds of academic

courses that vary in both topic (The Cuban

Missile Crisis, The Science Behind The Bike and

iPhone App Development, to name but three)

and quality. Many are provided by renownedinstitutions such as Harvard, Oxford and the

Open University, and the way the courses are

packaged together is tremendous. I could watchSandel deliver his lecture in full-screen mode, or

tap a button and type notes with the onscreen

keyboard, while the video continued to play in

a thumbnail screen. Bundled with the videos are

links to the course notes and further readingmaterials. Other courses use podcasts instead of

video, but both are downloadable so you canwatch on the train to work.

It started me thinking, and about more thanthe ethics of shoving fat fellas under trains: is

this type of distance learning that much worse

than the education I received at university 15

years (sob) ago? Sure, I cant ask questions live

in the lecture theatre, but then neither can mostof the 1,000 students in the room with Sandel

at Harvard. Nor is there any personal tuition,

but then I dont remember a great deal when I

was at university, either.

The biggest difference between virtualand actual university courses is that no

matter how well I grasp the concepts Sandel isthrowing at me I wont leave with a couple of

letters after my name and Harvard on my CV.

However, other online courses do offer

accreditation. Former Googler Sebastian

Thrun, who worked on the companysself-driving car (see p29), recently set up

Udacity, an online university that offers courses

in computer science. His course on artificialintelligence attracted 160,000 students, and at

the end of the course they took the same exam

as students from red-brick universities. More

than 23,000 graduated, and the top-scoring

students are being headhunted by companiessuch as Google.

Could iTunes U, Udacity and a growing

band of other online institutions (including

OpenLearn, Khan Academy and Coursera)

really compete with the great universities ofOxford, Cambridge and Hull?* When theyre

charging thousands of pounds in course fees

just to enrol in red-brick universities, you

dont need a masters in economics, or a degree

in psychology, to understand why studentsmight be tempted.

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