This is part of a project to investigate how advances in educational software may impact post secondary educational institutions. [Caveat emptor: It is very much a work in progress at this time. ]
Students are learning via videos (e.g., coursera, edX, Khan Academy, Youtube). There are a bevy of tools to support the learning process (ie, forums, VoIP). As technology automates aspects of education, more students will have the opportuntity to learn and teachers can focus on students and the learning process. Historically, relationships are critical: student/teacher, peer-to-peer or student/mentor. These relationships are still the bedrock of education. This challenges the current educational institutions. Will it prove fertile ground for places where people come together to learn? Can the ideas behind hacker spaces (ie, hacker dojo (http://www.hackerdojo.com/), biocurious(http://biocurious.org/), the tech shop http://www.techshop.ws/, etc) provide more general guidance here?
The reaper subdirectory contains code which parses the csv file from the US department of Education and populates a Mongo database.
This initial dataset is from the US department of education which provides a list of eductional institutions. The code references a csv file called Accreditation_2012_03.csv. It downloaded from US Department of Education and it contains a database of accredited postsecondary institutions and programs in the US as of March 2012. It was downloaded with this URL http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/GetDownloadFile.aspx.