[Bf-education] Blender College Concerns

[joshex]

I will try my best to explain away some of the concerns listed,

Credibility; I'm not sure many people know what a grading rubrik is but it's used in many colleges who have teachers who (to be fair) don't know a single thing about the topic they are in charge of. For example I've had teachers in charcoal drawing who can't draw to save thier life.

The rubrik for art is fairly straight forwards, 1 example picture is made, this picture is made in various different quality levels and each picture corresponds to a grade, in addition to the pictures; a text explanation of the exact points and qualities to look for in the image are listed. When grading a students work with a rubrik you merely have to go down the list and compare, you don't actually have to be a teacher to do this, yet it does add credibility to the works. All course work could be set-up with strict rubriks, then we have something to show to establish our course's credibility.

I've been in enough colleges to know that many students get a bachelors 
degree in a field that afterwards they know very little about. the 
teachers are fairly incompetent, especially in art and creative portions of degrees (how on earth can one person truly instruct someone on how 
to create vivid and imaginative works that everyone is garaunteed to 
love?) 

A difference, most colleges use thier name and accredidation and a grade point average to confirm to employers about the quality of an applicant. they don't actually have the applicant's college works on record nor the reason why the student was graded so well (and many businesses are tired of hiring people they need to fire a few months later after pumping money into thier pockets for a bunch of shotty work). With my set-up we would actually have more to show when employers want to know if someone actually has a valid degree from Blender College. Employers would be able to see the works the applicant has done and compare them in quality to what they need.

In essence there will be strict knowledge sets that must be demonstrated by the students in accordance with federal education standards, and publically visible records of each students works for these various assignments. In this way peer grading can work.

My examples are from USA university accredidation requirements.


Fees: When I started to do my reasearch on this a long while back in september I thought like you do "Oh dang somewhere down the line some rich person needs to get paid as a compensation for the blender foundation's accredidation." However, accredidation institutions in the USA are federally required to be Not-For-Profit, and there is no review fee in many of them or if there is it's nominal.

I have actually attended a college that has accredidation that functions similar to this set-up (they are alot cheaper than most colleges because they too are not for profit.) however, from what I see there is no mandate that a educational institute MUST charge a fee. There is also no mandate that the institute MUST have teachers, the only mandate is that the courses need to be held strictly to the standards of the accredidation institute and federal government, and of coarse if you have teachers there are regulations regarding that.

Bottom line on fees, if the whole process is automated except the stuff the students need to do, then there will be no costs.

The goal is to have no teahcers, and as such, no charge. However this means the student is on thier own to study and figure out how to achieve whats necessary to get the highest grading rubrik.


Finally, Why get a degree thats so limited?

because it will be preferential when developers find out that blender has a huge open source repository of nifty things.

In the last college course I took it talked about a growing fad and asked me to comment as to why this fad is happening. the fad is that alot more companies are switching to GPL based software, simply because it's not only free but it also outperforms or has more of a repository of benefits.

Open source software is superior to pay ware because we actually like making what we make, it's not a job.

in the same regard, If we can get the world's first "free" college going then i can forsee alot of colleges closing thier doors, permanently. free college will replace pay college.

Afterall, lets not forget why america made the Freedom of education act; because in those days graduating from highschool made you stand out in the career field and get better higher paying jobs. College and universities at the time were excluded because colleges at that time only taught hoity stuff like The Rudiments of latin, Dance, Calligraphy, and other useless high society stuff.

but now, college is the new highschool, with it you have a significant advantage in the job market. so, I think it's time college was free, either entirely paid for by taxes or just completely free because there are no real staff. 
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