School's out there

Its students pay as much as HK$500,000 per year and often end up in the best paid jobs, but now Princeton University in the US has become the first educational institution to invite students from all over the world to take part via the internet in its most sought-after courses - free of charge.

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Published: 12:00am, 22 Feb 2013Updated: 3:05pm, 22 Feb 2013

Its students pay as much as HK$500,000 per year and often end up in the best paid jobs, but now Princeton University in the US has become the first educational institution to invite students from all over the world to take part via the internet in its most sought-after courses - free of charge.

More than 700,000 people around the globe signed up for a 12-week "experimental" course entitled History of the World Since 1300, which promised weekly video lectures, an online discussion forum and - gulp - several essays along the way. Uniquely, this experimental course shadowed an existing "proper" taught course at Princeton.

Was this an act of pure altruism or a public relations move to combat the regular charges of elitism directed at Ivy League colleges? In fact, it was neither, as I found out when I joined the course and got stuck in to 712 years of global history. It proved a lesson not only in the history of globalisation, but in the future of global education where knowledge is disseminated simultaneously in classrooms, lecture theatres, online forums and even in Google+ Hangouts.

"It was exhausting," says Professor Jeremy Adelman, who recorded hours of lectures every week for release each Sunday night on a new platform called Coursera coursera.org as well as dozens of seminars.

"There was lots of viewing of the lectures, medium usage of the discussion forums and about 3 per cent of the students actually submitted papers on a regular basis," he says, although the figures are still impressive. When the course closed, there were 93,072 total registered users, with 1.2 million views of the lectures, and 430,000 reading the forum discussions.

Not surprisingly, the six essays - which ranged from the conquest of the Americas to the cold war and globalisation - proved less popular. Although 5,600 essays were written, only 1,968 people submitted essays, all of which were evaluated by fellow students. Four of those essays were mine. "You're hard-core," says Adelman, though his motivation for the course wasn't just to engage the likes of me.