Paris has a
university with no teachers, syllabi or fees
Night is the best time to catch the action
at France's École 42 experimental university that has no teachers, syllabi,
entrance requirements or even fees. Rush hour is 2 or 3am, says Xavier Niel,
the French telecom billionaire who set it up in north Paris three years ago. “We're
open 24 hours--the French president was here taking selfies at midnight.“
In
2013, Niel, who learned to code at 16 on a Sinclair ZX81 and dropped out of
school to work on Minitel phone-connected monitors, declared the education
system didn't work and decided to reinvent it by funding an ambitious
merit-based coding school. He chose to name it École 42 after an answer in The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And it did so well that in autumn of 2016 he
opened a second branch in Fremont, California. Although prior degrees are not
required, admission is based on merit. “We have 80,000 applicants a year who
play an online game, and 25,000 finish, “ Neil explains. “We take the 3,000
best and ask them to come to the school for a month-that's 450 hours of 15-hour
days, including Saturday and Sunday. After five or six days, a third of them
leave. And then we take the 1,000 best.“
The
survivors--80-90% of whom are French, and many of the rest Americans-win a free
education, help in finding accommodation (Niel is building 900 flats), loan
guarantees, if needed, and access to high-quality internships.
The
project-based curriculum consists of 21 modules or `game levels' designed by
six staff in an upstairs enclave called `the cluster'. Apart from a five-minute
instructional video and PDF, students are left to learn in groups.
After
a month, they should be able to code in the programming language C; they're
challenged to build the games Tetris and Sudoku from scratch using their new
skills, and then move at their own pace: the fastest student finished school
after 18 months.
Kevin
Carey, author of The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the
University of Everywhere, sees a global $4.6 trillion higher education market
being disrupted. That may not be a bad thing: under the current university
system, student debt in the US alone is now estimated above $1.2 trillion.
Source | Times of India | 21 January 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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