Jerry Brown pushes UC to find ‘outer limits’ of online education


A busy Wednesday morning delivering his State of the State address and handing out Sutter Brown playing cards didn’t keep Gov. Jerry Brown from heading to San Francisco to talk online education at the bimonthly meeting of the University of California Board of Regents, The Tribune reports.

Sitting in on part of Wednesday’s meeting, Brown challenged regents to develop classes that require no “human intervention” and might expand the system’s reach beyond its student body.

“If this university can probe into” black holes, he said, “can’t somebody create a course — Spanish, calculus, whatever — totally online? That seems to me less complicated than that telescope you were talking about,” referring to an earlier agenda item.

After receiving pushback from UC provost Aimée Dorr, who delivered the presentation, that students are “less happy and less engaged” without human interaction, Brown said those measurements were too soft and he wanted empirical results.

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