Educational Elites Will
Deliver Digitally, Says
Ellison
(05/26/98; 6:14 p.m. EST)
By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had some good
news and some bad news for educators on
Tuesday.
Educators will make thousands, even
millions of dollars teaching courses like
Physics 101. That's the good news, he said
at the Second International Harvard
Conference on Internet and Society in
Cambridge, Mass.
The bad news is that there will only be
about 60 of them who will be doing it, he
said. "Great teachers' courses will be
converted for electronic transmission,"
Ellison said.
The acceleration of networking
accomplished by the Internet will change
everything, said Ellison, pointing to
education as the recipient of some of the
most sweeping changes.
"Education might be the single biggest
advantage the U.S. has over Asia," he
said. "We're going to start exporting that
through the Internet." There will be
economic incentives for Harvard to
distribute their products electronically,
Ellison said.
That, in turn, will create a "tremendous
tension between institutions of higher
learning and faculty over who owns
Physics 101," he said. "There will be a
tremendous change in the cost of
delivering higher learning -- it will cost
one-tenth as much to deliver an
education."
In the meantime, Oracle (companyprofile)
will continue to build on its education
business, which totalled a half-billion
dollars in revenue last year. The company,
which Ellison founded in 1977, is trying
to make a business directed at
kindergarteners through 80-year-olds --
"anybody who needs to update their
knowledge base," Ellison said.
Regards
Neil |
