Disclaimer: I am currently contributing to Big Think with my blog “Disrupt Education“.
Pretty exactly one year ago, Bill Gates said the following now famous sentence at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe.
“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”
The Floating University is a venture of The Jack Parker Corporation, a New York real-estate-development company, and Big Think, taking a step towards that direction.
The project is based on a problem Adam Glick, the president of Jack Parker had when hiring employees for the company. He always struggled to find candidates with broad general knowledge as universities usually don’t offer cross disciplinary courses outside of “disciplinary silos”.
The first course “Great Big Ideas: An Entire Undergraduate Education While Standing on One Foot” is going to start on September 2nd. It will be taught students at Harvard, Yale and Bard as well as to everyone who enrolls to the course via the Floating University website.
For the first time in more than three centuries, Harvard and Yale will concurrently offer the same course — and its primary “text” won’t be a book, but rather a video lecture series comprising the world’s greatest thinkers and leading scholars.
The course delivers an undergraduate liberal arts education in 12 weeks, taught by renown professors like Steven Pinker, Tamar Gendler, Michio Kaku or Leon Botstein. The challenge for the lecturers given by The Floating University was to tell everything one needs to know about the particular subject in less than 60 minutes.
“As a result, our video lectures are highly focused, and rich in content, animation and graphics that make knowledge come alive. It is like reading a 600-page book in one hour.”
The Floating University is going to offer a growing selection of courses which are all going to be available to the general public.
The enrollment to Great Big Ideas costs $495 and the lectures will be available for six months from the date of purchase and includes 12 video lectures of 40 to 50 minutes each.
Website: floatinguniversity.org
Twitter: @floatingu
Facebook: Floating University
