Duke Engineering Seminar: The Future of Higher Education

Larry Spence wrote, "Plop a medieval peasant down on a modem dairy farm and he would recognize nothing but the cows. A physician of the 13th century would run screaming from a modem operating room and Galileo could only gape and mutter touring NASA's Johnson Space Center. Columbus would quake with terror in a nuclear sub. But a 15th century teacher from the University of Paris would feel right at home in a Berkeley classroom." But we have learned more in the past 20 years about how people learn than in the past 2000, and higher education is (finally) changing. In this talk we will explore these changes and speculate on the hopeful and terrifying future of the modern university.