Malgosia Green and I spoke yesterday about Nuvvo, the online learning company she founded with her husband, John. Their service provides alternative ways to deliver learning material and courses using the Internet. Nuvvo is described as one of the top ten Web 2.0 companies around - anywhere.

Education pundits have been saying for years that the Net would make Colleges and Universities obsolete. Now we are beginning to see how. The BBC reports:

Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University, says the move will free up time for more small group teaching.

He told The Times Higher Education Supplement that first year biochemistry students would watch or listen to virtual lectures in their own time.

Students will access the podcasts via their MP3 player, phone or computer. . . .

Dr Ashraf said the move would better suit the needs of distance learners, part-time students and those balancing studies with family and work.

In addition, Dr. Paul Kedrosky blogs about the recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research:

We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect weakened in the 1980s and disappeared in the 1990s. We decompose this university fixed effect and find that its decline is due to the reduced importance of physical access to productive research colleagues. We also find that salaries increased the most where the estimated externality dropped the most, consistent with the hypothesis that the de-localization of this externality makes it more difficult for universities to appropriate any rent. Our results shed some light on the potential effects of the (...read more...)