Students Get College Credit For Playing Guitar Hero?
The average four-year college education costs over 50 thousand dollars. Parents write out tuition checks assuming that their kids are being taught valuable knowledge and skills -skills taught by an experienced professor. So how would you feel if you found out that you were paying $1,078 per credit hour for your kid to play Guitar Hero?
New York University now offers a class called “Guitar Heroes: Music, Video Games and the Nature of Human Cognition.” While many students are excited about the class, many parents are upset by paying for something that their kid has most likely mastered outside of school in the first place. Have schools gotten lazier? Are there not enough underpaid adjunct professors willing to actually teach something that kids won’t learn on their own?
Offering trendy classes in college is
Facebook For Dummies
Are these pop culture classes worth paying for? That’s debatable.
Many people (including myself) think its kind of a cop out. Its time filler. What else can you throw in a four-year general education? I can just imagine the professors coming up with these classes. “I’ll teach a class that is timely, easy, and will make grading papers fun.”
In Kentucky, author and professor Ken Keffer really enjoys walking. He came up with the class “The Art of Walking” (which also happens to be the title of his book.) The course offers a mixture of lectures and walks around the Danville, Kentucky area including strolls with his dog through nature preserves, battlefields, cemeteries, the nearby Shaker Village, campuses and farms.
I’m not saying that college classes need to be boring and hard. But come on! Twitter and Facebook classes? Seriously? Maybe if you live under a rock. But for most of us, what a waste of money.
September 10, 2009
Tags: facebook class, guitar hero class, twitter class Posted in: Waste-of-time classes
One Response
The walking class I’m most skeptical about – but beyond that, I think that if you’re of the opinion that a college education should instill, not just specific information, but critical thinking skills, then anything and everything should be able to become the object of that critical thinking. If done well, these course could be very effective (though I’m a psychologist, so I realize there’s a world of difference between a cognitive scientist teaching a “… and human cognition” class and an American Studies prof teaching the same).
Of course, I’ll concede that probably only a fraction of these are well executed. If a student requires THAT much of a gimmick to get into their classes, maybe college isn’t for them?
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