College puts courses on USB flash drives

If stuff like this continues, we won’t even need to [go to] school anymore.

Thomas Edison State College looks to be using some new (or actually, somewhat old) technology to make courses at least a little bit easier to stomach. Essentially, the school is loading entire courses onto USB keys. You get all the functionality of the school’s  typical 12-week asynchronous online courses, without the need for a continuous internet connection. Sounds pretty good to me.

After test-driving the program on 100 students, the school is offering a multitude of these FlashTrack courses to all of its 17,000~ students. According to school officials, these courses are designed to increase accessibility and minimize technical issues for adults earning a college degree. Students will apparently only need an internet connection to submit finished assignments and participate in online discussions, with the rest of the course doable offline. You just need to pay a small fee for a 2GB flash drive with everything loaded on it, but you can also download everything onto your own USB drive for free, apparently.

The FlashTrack course also goes as far as to load some “required” programs onto the drive as well. You get BlackBoard (a web-based course-management system,) AbiWord (a small open-source Microsoft Word equivalent,) and an open-source media player to play lectures and presentations. (That way, you won’t have any problems opening the files included on the drive.) You’ll get books loaded on the drives too in the future.

In my opinion, this is a very nice idea and something that should be rolled out in every college. What are your thoughts on this new program?

Filed Under: Found on the Web