schoolyard subversion

2000-10-20 [< * >]

When you first enter ArsDigita University, it almost seems as if you're entering some sort of high security complex. From the street, the building shows no signs of the bustling educational experiment within. You must enter through a locked door, walk down a flight of stairs and turn three corners before you enter the school itself.

ArsDigita University, or aDUni for short, is the first of its kind. Some have called it a "startup university," a "free education experiment" or just a fun place to learn. Started by Philip Greenspun, founder of ArsDigita Corporation, aDUni offers an intense training in Computer Science -- for free.

ArsDigita, from which the University draws all its funding, develops interactive web sites for corporations. Thus, it is only natural that the University uses its website to coordinate the classes. Every student is provided with a personal portal page which lets them keep up-to-date on their grade and track their progress. It also allows them to provide anonymous feedback to their teachers with their thoughts about the class.

But aDUni is not just a website -- it has real classes, with real teachers, in a real building. The classes are taught in Cambridge, outside of Boston, home to MIT and Harvard. Everywhere, aDUni seems to live in the shadow of MIT, its larger brother.

As I entered that morning's lectures, I was surprised at the wide range of students. There were students of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. Few of them, however, were the kind of computer geeks you'd find at MIT or Caltech; none of them had majored in Computer Science. Most scribbled notes in notebooks, one entered them into his Palm hand-held, another tried to catch up on his sleep.

However, that was probably because of how late he had stayed up the night before, rather than any reflection on the quality of the classes or his dedication. When you're at the university, you quickly notice how dedicated the students are -- they're all here because they really want to be, not because they have to be, or they're pressured to. "I've never wanted anything so badly in my life," one student said. They have to want it badly. aDUni has a rigorous admissions process, requiring high scores on the SATs and a private interview with the faculty.

However, while only a few were allowed into the first class, aDUni tries not to exclude. In the back of the room was a camera. All of the lectures are videotaped, and will be provided for free on-line, and also made available on VHS and DVD. They also provide the textbook for October's course, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming, on-line. A distant learning program is in the works to allow people to take aDUni classes at home, at their own pace.

Once students are admitted, they discover that the curriculum is just as rigorous as the admissions procedures were. aDUni is an intense education, teaching in one day what other schools might teach in a week. It only teaches one subject: computer science, and everyone takes the same course at the same time. Classes run on a tight schedule -- every month is a complete colege course. The classes start with basic math, move on to cover more theoretical things like algorithms and system design, and end up with real-life projects, like the creation of a database-driven, dynamic web service. Many of the students I spoke with preferred the intensity, feeling it helped them concentrate and work their hardest.

Everyone is interested in seeing whether or not aDUni will succeed, but the students don't seem to feel any pressure. After the lecture was over, they went back to their workstations -- the "Ivory Basement", as the sign on the door read. They laughed, joked, surfed the web, and goofed off. But they got down to work too. They worked hard, sometimes long into the night, at the Linux machines provided to each of them. They were hard on their teachers too: the students asked lots of questions, corrected the teachers' mistakes, and met together for one-on-one tutoring sessions.

It will be interesting to see how the students feel about the school at the end of the year. Will they be able to remember what they've learned after such an intense schedule? How will the school affect their lives? As one student said: "This is going to change my life -- I just know it." As the website says: "If you hope to change the world and become richer than Bill Gates in the course of doing so, you're probably our kind of student!"

Note: This article was featured on the aDUni site, as well as K5.org -- thanks to everyone!

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