Singularity University is branching outside Silicon Valley with its first international program to take place in November in Brazil. SU has teamed up with FIAP, one of the leading academic technology centers in the country, to establish an executive program. For six days (8 Nov to 13 Nov) students will learn from the likes of Dan Barry, Andrew Hessel, and other faculty members who will be on location in São Paolo. Other key SU figures, like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, will be tele-commuting in via video conferencing. As always the focus will be on how accelerating technologies can be leveraged to change and aid humanity. This international program is being offered at a relative bargain, just 8000 reais (~$4700 USD), much less than the typical SU executive program which runs $7.5k to $15k. It’s also open to many more participants, up to 350 according to the site. Check out Peter Diamandis’ pitch for the program in the video below. There’s still time to sign up if you’re interested.
I’m rather impressed with how quickly Singularity University is expanding. They’ve only just finished their second summer program, and they already have their sights on international franchising. It’s also cool, and fitting, that they’re using video conferencing technology to facilitate this launch over seas. In fact, there are some big advantages to the video based lecture series. Like Diamandis’ call for applicants, all of the SU/FIAP lectures will be in English with simultaneous broadcast in Portuguese. This instantaneous translation will probably be less jarring when paired with the normal lag for international video calls. In the future, it will probably makes sense to simply move much of SU Executive Program online. It’s great to establish a connection with FIAP, but why not also have a simultaneous program in Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. Or Turkey, Japan, and Italy for that matter. Once we enable faculty and students to meaningfully connect via video calls, the range of Singularity University becomes global. It will likely take a few years to establish such an online education platform, but considering SU’s rate of expansion, maybe it will arrive sooner than I think. Who knows, perhaps the Executive Program class of 2012 will have thousands of participants from all over the world meeting in cyberspace.
[image credit: Singularity University]
[source: Singularity University, FIAP, KurzweilAI.net]
