But while the Dutch academic world was focusing on starting a new academic year under unusual circumstances, I think there was another important piece of news in the media
I read online that Google has new plans: ‘Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree. Google’s new certificate program takes only six months to complete, and will be a fraction of the cost of college.’ (Justin Bariso in Inc.com).
Ask Altavista, Hotmail or Blackberry if you don’t believe it, but if Google suddenly looks in your direction it can mean a serious disruption of your business model. Google claims that its six-month certificate is the equivalent of a four-year Bachelor’s degree (that is how long a first degree usually takes in the US). And the costs will be a fraction of what is normal in the expensive American college system. By doing this, Google is pushing both prospective students and established universities to ask: what is the value of a university education? Does it always have to take three or five years, or could it be shorter?
Google is coming and the academic world had better watch out
I decided to put this to the test, and I’ve embarked on a six-month programme, Google IT Automation with Python. I am struck by the high quality of the systems in all these kinds of programmes. But what I dislike is that all the variation that is woven into human life and the world is removed from the learning process. In order to cope with large numbers of students at the same time, all the questions are kept simple so they can be graded instantly by the system.
Longer assignments are simply impossible because they would create too many variables, so all the assignments are served up in tiny chunks: very manageable but the students doesn’t get much of an overview of the subject. You learn how to debug one small function, but not how to write an entire program.
Google is coming and the academic world had better watch out. But now the first students are back on campus, you can see where the added value of a physical university lies: in learning to solve real-world global problems using both theoretical and practical skills. You can’t do that sitting in front of a screen, however hard we try to do so in the new normal.
Guido Camps (36) is a vet and postdoc in Human Nutrition. He enjoys cooking, beekeeping and unusual animals.