This is very interesting and I like the finance model a lot. I'd be curious to see more details on the syllabus, however.
I also have questions about the quality of instruction. There are some big name institutions listed, but that doesn't necessarily indicate quality instruction. The best researchers are often emphatically not the best instructors, and for this venture instructors are much more important.
I sincerely hope this is successful; perhaps this can prompt traditional institutions to be more innovative (in delivery, instruction, finance, all of it).
> The best researchers are often emphatically not the best instructors, and for this venture instructors are much more important.
This is very true. Most of our instructors are refugees from an academic world; they really just want to teach, and research for them was a necessary evil.
We have a pretty rigorous hiring process (and we're hiring now! careers@lambdaschool.com)
Not OP, but I think your "syllabus" is seriously lacking in detail. For example, you have a week and a half of "operating systems" That is summarized as 4 bullet points. I would really expect to see at least a paragraph under each of the three sections describing exactly what a student should understand after completing each module. For the operating systems section, I would like to see something like this for the first half of week 19:
|Operating Systems II
|After completing this section, students should be able to describe the various levels of memory used by modern computers, including CPU caches, RAM and swap space. Students should understand how each of these levels of memory are used during program execution. Additionally, students should understand how memory is addressed, including physical and virtual addressing, how memory is managed and allocated by the operating system, and how memory may be shared by multiple processes on the same system.
I also have questions about the quality of instruction. There are some big name institutions listed, but that doesn't necessarily indicate quality instruction. The best researchers are often emphatically not the best instructors, and for this venture instructors are much more important.
I sincerely hope this is successful; perhaps this can prompt traditional institutions to be more innovative (in delivery, instruction, finance, all of it).