The campus tsunami: Online education is the wave of the future, even at elite universities

May 7, 2012 By David Brooks Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007. But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures. Last week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming."... For complete article please see: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/david-brooks-the-campus-tsunami-online-education-is-the-wave-of-the-future-even-at-elite-universities-634705/

THE BILINGUAL BRAIN IS SHARPER AND MORE FOCUSED, STUDY SAYS

April 30, 2012, 5:01 PM Wall Street Journal Blog / Health Blog By Robert Lee Hotz The ability to speak two languages can make bilingual people better able to pay attention than those who can only speak one language, a new study suggests. ...Through this fine-tuning of the nervous system, people who can master more than one language are building a more resilient brain, one more proficient at multitasking, setting priorities, and, perhaps, better able to withstand the ravages of age, a range of recent studies suggest. Indeed, some preliminary research suggests that people who speak a second language may have enhanced defenses against the onset of dementia and delay Alzheimer’s disease by an average of four years, as WSJ reported in 2010. The ability to speak more than one language also may help protect memory, researchers from the Center for Health Studies in Luxembourg reported at last year. ... See: http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2012/04/30/the-bilingual-brain-is-sharper-and-more-focused-study-says/?mod=dist_smartbrief