Imagine if you are a parent and you are accompanying your freshman child on their first day in college but there are no teachers around. In fact, there are no teachers at all. As strange as it may sound, there really is a college like this that exists in California.
Even the name of the college is quite strange as well - 42, which was the answer to the meaning of life from the science fiction series 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' The university was first established in Paris in 2013 by the French technology billionaire Xavier Niel and aims to teach hundreds of students every year how in coding and software development
The idea of 42 is to allow students to collaborate, teach, and mark each other's works through projects based learning. This means that students can choose which project they want to be involved in based on the target job they want to have in the future. For example, if they set themselves to become a software engineer, most of the projects he or she will be given will be related to or revolved around this.
Once they chose a project, they can complete it by using any resource or tool available on the Internet, or they can ask their peers for help. Seeking help is easy since the setting is an open-plan room filled with computers. Then, another student will be chosen randomly to check their work. Graduation takes place when students reach level 21 which usually takes three to five years.
The setting might look like it's headed toward chaos since there are no supervising teacher around. However, founder Niel said that this kind of learning makes students work much better with others and are more able to defend their ideas which, he said, are very important skills in the real world.
"Peer-to-peer learning develops students with the confidence to search for solutions by themselves, often in quite creative and ingenious ways," he added.
The idea might still be new and strange but the college seems to be doing something right because a lot of its graduates are already working in large tech companies, such as IBM, Tesla, and Amazon while large number is starting their own companies.
