Ask HN: College without college (idea) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: College without college (idea)

1 pointcoryl7 comments

HN'ers, I had an idea about opening up education to everyone.

So if you've been to college, you know some of your profs upload content and documents like presentations, slides, notes, syllabuses, etc. to share with students.

I was wondering, why isn't this available to anyone who wants to see it? Organized/aggregated efficiently and relevantly? Why isn't it available on the web forever? Or for free?

A regular joe who isn't enrolled in university could buy the text book and follow along the lesson plan just like a freshman. They wouldn't get the kind of quality of learning that attending lectures gives, but its valuable content nonetheless.

There could be some sort of publishing platform that lets teachers openly share the lessons they have. Something as simple as a dropbox for every professor/course. Imagine having access to the lectures of some of the smartest professors out there.

Objections I could see to this:

Profs don't want their content publicly shared

Educational institutions are opposed to giving away free content

What other objections would people raise? Do you think theres a market for accessing university course content alone (rather than an immersive educational experience)?

Thanks guys

I'm surprised you aren't aware of OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/). It's been around for several years now, and its existence could cause one to read your post as sardonic or tongue in cheek.

Thats actually what I was thinking, but on a global scale.

So not just MIT's site, aggregating content from all universities. A lot of the content on MIT's site is from 5 years ago. When you tend to have the content managed by one party, it'll get bogged down and not work as well as it should over time.

MIT's emphasis on teaching foundations means that 5 year old content is generally going to be just fine (and if it uses a prior edition of a textbook, a whole lot cheaper as well).

One thing you're not considering is just how expensive doing this is:

The content has to be captured. If you want video of the lectures, that and most of the subsequent steps get a lot more expensive. And for a lot of courses lecture notes just don't cut it.

Publication rights have to be ironed out. You're got to iron this out with the professors involved, which at the very least will cost you some lawyer time plus political negotiations etc. etc. What's Fair Use (real or practical) for a classroom may not work for the web, and this kills some courses where the reading consists of a bunch of research papers. Etc.

The content has to be prepared for the web site. E.g. convert various word processor documents into PDFs.

Running the web site costs money.

I pay thousands of dollars for tuition, and you don't. I earned my right to attend my school, and you didn't. I deserve access to my course material, and you don't. I would be so pissed if I went to MIT, and they just started giving things away like that.

Interesting point. So you think students would be opposed to having their professors/universities give open access to educational content? I personally wouldn't care. The value in a college education isn't the notes or content alone, its the teacher/student interaction.

Also, other people aren't "attending" your school (taking up class spots), and they certainly aren't graduating with a degree. I have a comment regarding elitism, but I'm not interested in a debate and I appreciate your post.

For the most part though, tuition doesn't pay for curriculum in the sciences. For good professors, >100% of their salary is paid for by grants they bring in, not tuition. The tuition goes to pay for other things, like the school's bureaucracy, athletic facilities, extracurricular activities, gardening, janitorial staff, and subsidizing the humanities, all of which don't have much to do with developing science curricula.

Interestingly enough, a lot of universities do have the course material available on their websites. Eg, I learned most of my compiler module from Stanford course notes because they were better than my own lecturers ones.

But I get what you're saying and imagine this is why not all universities do this. If everything were free, they may not get so many people paying for it.

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