Peer to Peer University

If Second Life and World of Warcraft are the beginnings of a future, where an increasing part of daily lives will be spent in a virtual world, restricting teaching and learning only the real world will become increasingly difficult. Yesterday, in one of my real world classes, one student said during discussions: "let me be honest. I am only here because I know that I will need a four-year degree to move up. I find it frustrating that this [he was referring to university education] is the only business where the consumer has no choice at all."

Of course, learning as a "consumer" behavior, as if it is like buying a soy milk latte, does not appeal to me. But, hey, that is the reality we are dealing with, and in the immortal words of a rather hopeless mortal, we can go to war only with the military we have :-(

So, on top of everything else, we can expect more and more of a demand for online learning. Politicians, who are already sold on the business/consumer model, will prefer this even more because then there will be less pressure for constructing new buildings, ....

Have I set the context up enough? Well, the Chronicle of Hr. Ed. has a report on yet another model for online teaching and learning: the Peer to Peer University. According to the Chronicle:

The organizers call it P2P University (for peer-to-peer), and they hope to fill what they see as a gap in online-education efforts by traditional colleges, which often focus more on delivering full degree programs online than on one-off courses. ....
P2P University's two main audiences will be working professionals who want to brush up on a topic for their jobs but don't have time to take a whole degree program, and recent retirees who have plenty of time on their hands and feel comfortable in cyberspace ....
Although the university will not grant credit or seek accreditation of any kind, it will encourage students to seek college credit elsewhere — either by asking a traditional institution to give independent-study credit or by directing students to Western Governors University or other institutions that grant credit to students who can prove they have learned certain material on their own. P2P University might issue some kind of certificate indicating who taught the course and what was learned, however, and in some cases that alone might be enough for students to show a boss or put on their CV