Saturday, November 17, 2012

Dromedary: Accreditation and WUaS paying for students who don't finish their degrees, Accrediting in Germany and other countries?


Hi Scott!

Thanks for this great hangout. As said, you do a very promising project. It all depends on the right execution. 
Thanks for the accreditation plan. I saw, that you have to pay for a defined number of students. My experience is that only a tiny fraction of registered student do really the course. I have no real statistics, but it might be less than 10%. How will this work, if you have to pay for accreditation on a per student base?

Have a nice weekend!

Best
G



Hi, G, 

Thanks for for participating this morning in WUaS's 2nd Student Board Meeting in our Stanford 'Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship' course, and from Berlin - the 1st Student Board Meeting is accessible here ... http://scottmacleod.com/papers.htm - and especially for adding so much to these WUaS Board conversations. WUaS seems still to be 'babystepping' along in terms of execution / executing our mission, and I'll be excited when the baby begins to run holding hands, let alone gets a little bigger than it is now. 

In startup WUaS's seeking of overachieving undergraduate students, who might otherwise go to MIT, H.Y.P. Stanford, Cambridge, et al., one way WUaS will try to approach the question of attrition, is through a careful Admissions' process - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Admissions_at_World_University_and_School. The more students who apply - and from Germany, too - the more likely we can choose students who say they'll complete the 32 required, MIT-centric, WUaS courses, and then do so, and then receive their bachelor's degree. And of the %7 or so who finished Sebastian Thrun's and Peter Norvig's 'Intro to A.I.' SINGLE course, 160,000 or so signed up by entering their emails ... and WUaS will probably require 32 courses. (I don't know the numbers in MIT professor and edX president Anant Agarwal's "Circuits and Electronics," but I think they are similar). Free and MIT, and online, on a comparative basis may be very compelling, but WUaS doesn't want to throw away monies due to attrition, and good, (online), support services (which are more jobs WUAS can hire for), may be part of the answer (paralleling a recent Reed College development). 

Can you think of any foreign universities in Germany, who have accredited in Germany for equivalent degrees to a bachelor, Ph.D., I.B., law and M.D. degree? What are some of your insights into this process? 

And I'm curious about your further thoughts about your Leukippos synthetic biology company and crowdsourcing, to develop this conversation, especially vis-a-vis eventual WUaS students, possibly? 

Did you, by any chance, save the links from the chat area of the Google + group video hangout? (I closed that browser window too early, and would like to share them with people in an email).

Have a great weekend. 

Best, 
Scott





...

No comments: