How many universities is too many?

Readers with little time on their hands can simply read this first sentence take-home message; all the Irish universities should, as matter of urgency, be rolled into a revamped National university, and all degrees awarded to date by DCU and UL should be validated by that body. This protects the 100k or so graduates of UL and DCU, while acknowledging that both institutions were given far too much autonomy, and university status way too early. Now, of course, they are rushing to pull up the ladder after them, and deny university status to Waterford/ Carlow;

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0123/1224310627145.html

Direct link

There is also a strong case for selling off both UL and DCU, and indeed many of the state-owned “third level” sites in the country. The reason; while this unseemly row is going on, the provisional tallies for Stanford's upcoming course enrollment has just been announced; the new diet of free courses has an average enrollment of over 40k, and MIT is about to enter the fray. By years' end, there will be over a million enrolled at both Stanford and MIT; in fact, Stanford has just about hit the million mark already with 17 courses in 2011-2012. There is no reason to try and put forward any competition; in this case, resistance indeed is futile. Full disclosure; I have worked at Stanford since 2002.

The smart thing for the Irish government to do would be to get ahead of the curve, and acknowledge that tertiary education changed irrevocably once Norvig, Thrun and Ng of Stanford demonstrated that classes of hundred of thousands in engineering subjects were technologically feasible. The minor cavil offered – that correction of computer programming assignments is coarse grained – simply amplifies the critical point that, desperate for ranking points, Ireland moved away a decade ago from TEACHING at its universities. Specifically, resources hitherto put into hiring tutors to help students learn skills like programming were redeployed into "research".

In fact, as repeatedly pointed out, Ireland's universities were to be a neoliberal experiment in unfettered use of state power to pursue a crony capitalist agenda. the levels of abuse of staff and students allowed are what motivated this blog. The Stanford/MITX initiatives put power back where it should be; in the hands of scholars, teachers and students alike.

Oh, the rankings! In fact, none of the Irish universities are in the top 200 in the only one that should matter – the shanghai. DCU is not even in the top 500. Why? Essentially, because the Chinese know that the number of Nobel laureates happy to work at a university is a better index to quality than the percentage of foreign students and foreign lecturers. Consider this; the Irish taxpayer is asked to pay for a very expensive system which bows to a rating system that values foreign scholars over ones genetically related to that taxpayer. The people for whom this charade is presumably created – the Chinese – are not in the slightest bit impressed.

Anyway, grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy the show as the 7 presidents who refused to cut their pay to 200k battle it out with the Labour party, The many sincere people in the Irish provinces who want a college should look at how the world is changing and adapt

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
Stanford University 22u Eanair 2012

PS 25 Ean 2012; Two recent events are probably not unrelated -

1. Those of us auditing some of the new Stanford mass courses (In my case, NLP) were told the courses were delayed;

2. Sebastian Thrun announced he was resigning from his tenured position at Stanford to set up a private university

udacity.com

outline syllabi

Udacity lays claim to ownership of the AI course, as you find in the intricate legal document you need to assent to get access to the "free" courses.

The connection? I went to the Comp Sci dept at Stanford last week to be told they had NOTHING to do with the mass courses.


PPS 18 Feabhra 2012 All is now clear; Ng and Koller have set up a company Coursera which will run the great majority of these courses once Vice-President Mitchell approves them, MITX starts Mar 5 2012, and tertiary education is finally undergoing a revolution greater and more beneficial than that which happened at Gutenberg, a revolution in which the entire world can participate.

This morning I got the following, confirming my view that there has been a row;

"We're sorry to have to tell you that our Natural Language Processing course will be delayed further. There have naturally been legal and administrative issues to be sorted out in setting up an online course infrastructure that works both for Stanford and the outside world, and it's just been taking time. We have however been able to take advantage of the extra time to debug and improve our course content!

We now expect that the course will start either late in February or early in March."

In fact, Coursera is not even being allowed to deliver courses already prepared - and seems to have moved material from Youtube

Some readers will know that in 1989 I set up the first specialist course - in fact, a whole degree program - in Ireland in Natural Language Processing. It was highly successful while I ran it, but was scrapped in 2003 - a DCU insider told me in order to foment redundancies - and millions of taxpayer $ were put into garbage projects like a "localization" center instead. So we have lost a generation.

26 u Feabhra 2012 - further corrections above after Daphne and Andrew told me that Mitchell is holding things up at Stanford, even for courses ready to go. Youtube seems to have lost some material; it is now on the Coursera website, which means no longer necessarily Creative commons/Youtube licensed