Why Dons Won't Be Logging On Today
Lucy Hodges,
Financial Times,
Apr 30, 2002
The headline of this article is a bit miselading as the academic boycott is mentioned in one paragraph only. The bulk of the story is devoted to some high profile failures in the e-learning field, most notably Open University's withdrawal from the American market and the continuing saga of Universitas 21. The gist of the story - and I am inclined to agree - is that these ventures spent huge sums on course development with no certain expectation of financial return. Part of it, I think, is that their business model was based on university-style tuition rates: but why would anyone pay such high tuitions for online learning when it should, by all rights, be cheaper? This business model led these ventures to spend much too much on course development, money that could have been muich better spent on developing marketing and services. Content is important, sure, but that's what learning objects are for. But the content isn't the course, and these entities never got that.
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