Burn Baby Burn
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But I'm afraid it won't happen for awhile, for several reasons:
1. The technology just isn't there yet. MIT's entire lecture series is not online, far from it. Many of the OCW courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It's horrible.
2. Not everyone has the tenacity to sit through four years of college classes and really learn something. Even fewer have the dedication to do it on their own, remotely, with no human interaction other than a webcam to guide them.
3. Schools such as MIT serve as a filter and a credibility indicator. They have great professors, of course, but anyone can obtain the raw knowledge they teach. What's harder to obtain on your own is the stamp of approval that you've . PG commented on Dropbox's YC application that was posted on here with his thought process. One of the first items was: "MIT...must be pretty smart." That's the power of a credibility indicator at work.
4. The people that are needed to make this happen are 1) parents, 2) government (for incentives), 3) existing institutions of higher learning, 4) employers (to hire these graduates). All of these groups are likely to have degrees that are granted using the current model, and thus none are likely to want to undermine their own education choices. What's the incentive for them to break with status quo?
5. School isn't just about what you learn...the best schools serve as a kind of bridging ground between childhood and adulthood. Perhaps there are better ways to accomplish this, but some kind of "GED for higher education" hardly seems to be a good solution. I'd rather hire employees who are smart and dedicated than knowledgeable. Most of what they need to know can be taught, but character and raw intelligence can't be, or at least not easily. Getting good enough grades in high school to get into a great school and then doing well in that school indicate both mental aptitude and the perseverance that I want in people who work for me.
These are off the top of my head...I'm sure there are more.
There is a well-known tendency to overestimate change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.
Even as I was predicting that this could have huge effects in posts yesterday, I say this fully aware that it won't happen next year, or the year after, or the year after. And even then, the inflection point I would look for is not "when nearly everybody goes online for college" but "when nearly every employer will accept online degrees as sufficient for employment verification", which is almost certain to happen many many years before a shift.
On that note, I completely disagree with your claim that all four groups need to move in sync. Only one group needs to move: employers. Once that happens, all the incentives will be put in place for the rest to follow in turn.
And, ultimately, that's my argument. Undercut the current universities by a full order of magnitude or more on price, and you completely realign the incentive structure. It will take time for society to adjust to the incentive structure, but it will be as inevitable as the move to cities when it happens. (And moaning about it about as productive as moaning about the loss of "small town values" as humanity keeps moving into cities.)
It won't happen in this recession, but it very well could happen in the next one. And if this one drags on for long enough... this recession has certainly had the effect of precipitating a lot of things that we've all known were coming for a while but expected to happen in the "indefinite future", with the definite future happening somewhat unexpectedly definitely in a nearer term than we thought. (Newspaper industry crashing, numerous industries facing rather more immediate results of bad decisions on pensions, the automotive and local governments most visibly, etc. All things that many people could see coming, but expected to be able to put off longer.) If this recession drags on for long enough the higher ed bubble could pop far sooner than anybody today would be willing to predict. Including me. I'm not predicting it, merely leaving the possibility open.
(I do think the next ten years are likely to end up more socially chaotic than the past ten or twenty would lead us to predict, and I don't mean 1960s-style social chaos, but chaos as fundamental institutions are broadly rewritten. A higher education bubble pop would be merely one part of that.)
Not sure what to call the volumes but you could store them in a modified tape library - without the tapes
That would change things for employers immediately.
But that kind-of assurance would be hard to give within the context of online course with form-based tests, however challenging the tests are. Someone who can absolutely anything online might still not have the social skills necessary for many jobs. We hope that someone who's done four years at a good school has absorbed some social skills. If there was online way to actually guarantee that a person has abilities that an employer wants, then online could win.
The other side of this is how quickly business in general becomes nothing but online interaction. The sooner that arrives, the sooner ability to interact well online will become the main qualification and thus the sooner an online degree will have prevalence.
1. The technology just isn't there yet. MIT's entire lecture series is not online, far from it. Many of the OCW courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It's horrible.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the technology, which is just fine thank you. What's missing is a few man-years of recording and post-production work - which colleges probably don't want to spend money on in order to give away free. A 2-hour lecture isn't too complex to film, but to get good results you need to spend maybe $2000+.
Multiply that out by the number of courses and you're looking at quite a chunk of money...although it would seem a highly appropriate task for a government grant (if you wanted to put the material into the public domain) or could be self-financing with a little planning.
Th BBC's open university offers a model for this, though a rather pricey one - http://www.open2.net/ ...inexplicably, though, it's still built around TV broadcasts which is kinda stupid nowadays.
I can imagine a lectures could be put on video for much less than $2000 each with the right technology.
Certainly you can do it for much less...$2000 was a ballpark price for doing something of pretty decent quality that's going to be visually engaging - the best lecturer in the world is a lot less compelling when s/he's been reduced to the size of a postcard or less. I think auto-editing would be next to useless except for the most basic things like:
while(wide_cam.frame.rightside.movement = true)
wait 10 seconds
edit_cut_to (medium_closeup.cam[1])
end while
On the other hand, I do think there's a great startup opportunity here, mixing some basic production techniques with some visual FX techniques (let's animate that polynomial as the lecturer explains it to us) and some decent interactive controls (pause and rewind are sloppy relics of linear information access - what we want are the kind of contextual controls at which game UIs excel).
Not really, for a number of reasons. One of which is that the OU's target audience includes people who might not be able to afford a multimedia PC. Another of which is that a broadcast creates a shared experience in time - the class can all be kept "on the same page". Dealing with a class who're all over the course would make it much more expensive.
I haven't lived in the UK for a while, so when I searched to find out what was up with the OU, I went to http://www.open2.net/ which is specifically for OU-on-TV resources. I should have one to http://www.open.ac.uk/ which is the real OU site, and where there are multiple study paths and resources, of which the TV broadcast lectures are only one option among many.
Sorry :-/
What I should have said
Non-UK HN readers should check out the Open University - this is the best landing page: http://www3.open.ac.uk/study You can get an accredited degree or pursue post-graduate studies, and while an OU degree is not as desirable as one from a top-end institution, it is still respected - not least because of the student dedication required. The OU does have absolutely outstanding course materials.
Student fees vary, though they're still a bit pricey - roughly $15,000 for an undergraduate degree if you live outside the UK, about half that if in. You need to be in Europe in order to take exams at least once a year.
Regarding your points:
1. MIT is MIT–most college students don't go there. Heck, most don't even try to get in. If you combine the online resources of all institutions, things like iTunesU, and other resources (Wikipedia), there is enough content to create alternative learning programs for most people.
Yes, I've used Blackboard. Yes, it's terrible. That is a software nice ripe for innovation–unfortuantely BB has some ridiculous web 1 patents. Hopefully those will get overturned soon.
2. The concept of a 4 year degree might simply be outdated. Personally, I envision more compressed, career-focused programs. I understand the need to be well-rounded and have a baseline competency in English and math, but I think you can easily shave 18+ months off a 4 year degree program without the final product changing.
3. He also got a 1600 on his SAT IIRC. And again, MIT is somewhat of an outlier in this regard. If you're going to severly shake up the edu space, MIT isn't where you aim IMO.
4.1 Lower costs and a faster track to their child having a job and moving out 4.2 Productivity/economic gains. Eventually, a smaller edu budget (just guessing here) 4.3 That's the tough one as they stand to lose the most ... but that's what disruptive technologies do ... they will have to adapt 4.4 Any Edu 2.0 should still have some sort of co-op/internship component, so hopefully these graduates will still come out with work experience ... perhaps even more than graduates now ... I think degree requirements are already becoming softer, anyway
5. I agree schools can serve as a childhood->adulthood bridge. But, more on a social level than an intelligence level. If raw intelligence is just that (raw), what does being on a campus change? Furthermore, doesn't completing a degree on one's own show more determination than going through the motions/schedule of a 4-year program?
I had a small edu startup before my current company. I'd love to be back there soon and be part of this change.
Does the existence of online video make this so much more compelling?
I do know that I enjoyed hanging around in the CmptSci common room and I learned a lot just shooting the breeze with students, TAs and the occasional prof. I would never have learned as much in a chatroom nor would I want to hang around in a chatroom. There are so many modes of communication that are not possible with the chatroom and you don't have the opportunity to bump into random, interesting people.
Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.
Instead of becoming a new medium, the computer, for the most part, is used as a facilitator of conventional ways of teaching - it's a better typewriter, a better book, a better way to watch a lecture.
1. One argument is that we already have franchised them: universities have access to textbooks of a higher-quality than they previously had. I'm sure we have more universities per capita than before the printing press... (though I haven't the stats).
2. You can set up a course today based on MIT resources. You have a professor (of lower quality), you have classmates (of lower quality). But the point about these things is that they still are greatly beneficial for learning, even if they aren't the greatest in the world.
3. McUniversity. The aforementioned trademark ("insignia of origin") aspect of a top uni: "Oh, you went to MIT?" etc. Franchising it dilutes it into a McUniversity (appropriately).
4. Facetime doesn't scale. Sure you can distribute face-time of a high-quality professor geographically with web-video etc, but such professors don't have enough time for all their students already.
But... an interesting concept... and surely there are aspects that do scale well, and can be franchised better than before due to today's tech... and therein lies a startup.
It looks to me like they try to cram as much stuff-that-looks-like-content in as possible so they can justify charging $100+ for the book. The disease is particularly bad at the first-year level where the publishers need to compete against dozens of other damn-near-identical textbooks; this is why every first-year physics textbook I know weighs half a ton and has lots of pretty pictures, whereas the actual content could probably be whittled down to a hundred pages or so.
One thing that a campus does, that would not exist with an online education, is create a community. Good universities get smart people together, which is invaluable in creating wealth.
For a better explanation of what I mean, see the "Universities" section of http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
[edited for grammar]
If you have a degree of MIT, that should tell people not that you were able to watch MIT lectures and do MIT tests, but that you spent at least 4 years developing your mind in one of the top academic and intellectual environments in the world. "I watched MIT lectures on the Internet" is not quite the same.
A 4-year college degree is almost a standard requirement for a white-collar-type job.
As for computer-based training, Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential lies with his the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in "The Diamond Age"
Exactly. Although the nanotech stuff remains distant, a present day Kindle or tablet system could easily incorporate synchronized interaction between children like Nell and actors like Miranda.
If you still need a human teacher, and that teacher has to be paid, what exactly have you gained by interposing the Kindle between the teacher and the student?
Greenspun once theorized that you could pay teachers in low-wage countries to do the tutoring, but I have trouble believing this will work. Communicating over a teleconference link is hard to do, even when there are adult-aged engineering graduates on both ends of the link. Show me the person from a low-wage country whose flawless command of English and uncanny ability to communicate over the phone allows them to effectively teach eight-year-olds from half a world away... and I'll show you someone who won't keep a low-wage job for long, because someone is going to offer them a high-wage job.
I don't think that follows. Nell's Primer was only a prototype. As a practical matter the kind of infrastructure that went into developing it would over time be replaced by something more economically and socially efficient. The story itself suggests that neither Miranda or the Primer's designers anticipated Nell's needs.
If you still need a human teacher, and that teacher has to be paid, what exactly have you gained by interposing the Kindle between the teacher and the student?
It's likely that little is gained in that limited student/teacher/employment context but in my experience[1] I think there are considerable educational opportunities once people step outside that traditional box.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/colle...
I am studying Law as an external student. All lectures are delivered using Powerpoint + MP3s. Tutorials via Wimba (both chat and audio). Study groups are actively encouraged (for some subjects they are required) and also use Wimba. Legal databases supplement traditional textbooks. Exams are done either on-line or invigilated at a University in my home town.
My campus is 1900 miles away and I need not visit it during my entire degree.
You might not be able to do it that way in Chemistry or Physics but in Law it works very well. I can't see why it wouldn't work in Mathematics or many other subjects.