IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

260 Notes to Pages 138–141
Political Science. By the autumn of 2001, citing the need to operate in a ‘‘fiscally conservative
manner,’’ the Deerfield, Illinois–based company had cut its workforce by 42
percent, laying off 135 of its 325 employees. Katherine S. Mangan, ‘‘Expectations
Evaporate for Online MBA Programs,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5,
2001, available at http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i06/06a03101.htm.
14. The assets of Hungry Minds were acquired by the textbook publisher John Wiley.
See the organization’s former website at http://www.hungryminds.com/.
15. Fathom struggled to attract both students and outside investors, forcing the university
to spend ten million dollars after its launch to keep the project afloat. Over
sixty-five thousand of Fathom’s visitors enrolled in courses and seminars, and the
company went on to form alliances with such prestigious partners as the British
Broadcasting Company. But visitors are no longer able to purchase courses through
Fathom, which has become an archive website.
16. Carol A. Twigg, ‘‘Notes for the June 4–5, 1997 NLII-ITP Symposium on Creating
and Delivering Collegiate Learning Materials in a Distributed (Networked) Learning
Environment: A Business Model for University-Corporate Collaboration,’’ available on
the EDUCAUSE website at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/nli0007.html.
17. Charles Vest, quoted in Carey Goldberg, ‘‘Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web
and Free,’’ New York Times, April 4, 2001, available at http://education.mit.edu/tep/
11125/opencourse/.
18. Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
(New York: Harper Collins/Basic Books, 1994).
19. David Forrest, ‘‘The High Price of Higher-Education Stocks,’’ March 9, 2004,
available on the Motley Fool website at http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/
2004/commentary040309df.htm.
20. Most colleges with significant e-learning offerings employ private companies—
e-learning call centers—that serve hundreds of colleges from the same technical
support center. Nortel Networks and United Parcel Service, which are active in this
market, charge institutions per-minute fees for each call or e-mail message that
comes in. With prices in the range of sixty to ninety cents a minute, a typical phone
call may cost an institution twenty dollars. This adds up.
21. The University of Phoenix Online does not quote lump-sum prices for its MBA
programs, but its website states that ‘‘while the cost of attending a private college
is over $20,000 a year at some schools, the cost of attending University of Phoenix
Online is less than half that.’’ ‘‘Cost,’’ available on the University of Phoenix Online
website at http://www.mba-programs-online.com/university-of-phoenix/cost.htm.
22. Larry Bouthillier, ‘‘Harvard Business School Website: A Case Study’’ (speech
delivered at the conference ‘‘OroOro TeachersLab,’’ Amsterdam, January 27, 2001,
available at http://www.teacherslab.hva.nl/transcripties/html/bouthilliertrans.html).