7 ms·

Can schools survive in the age of the web?

29 points by brkumar 14y ago

mokash 14y ago
I can't read this article in the UK. http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png Apparently we're allowed to benefit from the profits they make with the BBC Worldwide service but we're not allowed to actually see the content.
- aspratley 14y ago
  There's a mirror of it here for UK readers: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401-8a21fd26c668/a5a7c9f72ab6fd97ada76634883cc87f https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401...
  - mokash 14y ago
    Cheers. :)
  - mykhamill 14y ago
    Thanks :)
- Swifty 14y ago
  I saw that, and was a bit confused as well. Seeing as I pay my licence fee (to watch any tv, but it only funds the BBC) its a bit annoying that I then cant see other BBC content.
columbo 14y ago
I've taken a few courses through coursera, udacity, racked up points in khan and I've watched some videos from the MIT open source libraries, so the answer to "But what will that mean for traditional institutions?" is they will (hopefully) change dramatically. Imagine having 5,000 students all wanting a MSCS, each student writes out a check for only $20,000 ($5,000 year). So you have $100 million dollars at your disposal for the complete education... what sort of 'online system' could you create for $100 million? Not just video, not just lectures, hell you could make games, interactive puzzles, you could pay to tape some of the brightest minds in the field... and you could change it --every year--. You could offer a better experience for a fraction of the price that students pay today. edit: fixed confusion over 20k
- mtgx 14y ago
  This Note 10.1 video is pretty inspiring about how kids could learn in the future through games. I really like this idea of learning through games. I think it could be very effective. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0krCDFLjdA&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0krCDFLjdA&feature=plcp
- zanny 14y ago
  Too bad 99% of student's don't have $20,000 a year lying around, it is why we have an imminent student loan bubble. The more likely scenario is a rapid freefall in education prices (a very good thing, I might add) to near 0, the implementation of global examinations for each grade level and course load rather than just the PSSAs / SAT / AP tests, and the usage of high quality lecture videos with Khan-style infinite question loops to learn material. And you definitely lose the traditional brick and mortar school buildings. They cost so much money when the alternative, aside the bickering about the quality of online learning vs traditional lecture halls, is orders of magnitude less expensive, and even government is subject to economics in the long run.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  If I was paying 20k/year that is in the same ballpark as a real university + I get all the other stuff, the experince, the connections, the friends, etc. You are more likely looking at 5k/year. At that price point it becomes a posibility for those who can't afford to quit their job and go to school but who still want to improve their life. Then, from there, you can grow the reputation of online school (which still have a huge stigma attached to it).
  - deleted 14y ago
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- f4stjack 14y ago
  Should they? I mean standard lecture format is not a very effective medium. You have to have an uninterrupted concentration on the lecturer to understand the topic. But this rarely happens. You have to write, read the board and listen to teacher for understanding what is being said. I am not even going into the topic of feasibility, you have to pay the teacher, trust that he or she will be in her top condition. And you also have to go to the building for getting the lesson. As you've said, a better system could be built with less cost. And contrary to the popular opinion it would be better.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I think I would have done better at school if there had been a camera at the back of the class and ability to download the videos later. Firstly, people tend to talk a lot in class. This is distracting and makes it difficult to hear what is being said. Perhaps if there was a recoding nobody would want their rude behaviour documented. When listening to a class it is also very easy for your concentration to wander for long enough that you have trouble keeping up with the rest of the lecture because you missed something. A video trivially allows your to rewind those minutes.
byoung2 14y ago
As the author and technology theorist Ian Bogost argued earlier this year, "if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?" A good analogy would be newspapers vs news websites. In the end, it is still the same news, but online it is more up-to-date, globally accessible, and more convenient to access. Lectures suck when they're at 8am and if you miss them they're gone forever. They also can't be paused or fast-forwarded. But most importantly, they only happen in one location. Putting them online puts them in the hands of students across the globe, and gives them the ability to watch them at any time, at their own pace.
- rimantas 14y ago
  You did nice job listing why lecturers suck. Now try and list why your teaching videos suck.
  - byoung2 14y ago
    Improving is an iterative process. You find problems, solve them, and then find more. Videos suck because they're static, they don't answer questions. So you make them adaptive. And so on.
ronyeh 14y ago
As Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a September article for the MIT Technology Review: “If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?” Maybe popular TV shows like Jersey Shore should contain public service announcements like "Snooki says: reading is fun!" Or maybe we need more on-screen text in games like Call of Duty & Halo. For example, you can't complete a particular objective unless you figure out that a paragraph of text tells you to look up a "code word" from page 6 of a real book like The Lorax. Schools and teachers aren't our problem. If parents and kids aren't intrinsically motivated to learn, how can you force them to? I hope that more American parents will convince their kids to take education seriously, or else many other countries (with access to American online courses) will eventually surpass us.
- mnemonicsloth 14y ago
  All people are intrinsically motivated to learn. People can give up wealth, sex, and addictive drugs. We can fast. We can even stop breathing for a little while -- or longer, with a little planning. But short of suicide, you can't stop thinking about the world around you.
  - samatman 14y ago
    Actually, learning to stop this process is the goal of several systems of meditation. It is by no means an easy thing to do, but it can be done, for short periods of time, and feels great.
    - bpatrianakos 14y ago
      Mthe goal or process of meditation is kind of an oxymoron. You actually are learning. You're learning to stop thinking briefly. And how do you do it? By thinking about not thinking. How do you that? Concentrate on your breath. The whole thing is very strange. You're thinking but you aren't. You're learning but you aren't. I don't doubt that it feels great and I accept that it is a beneficial thing to do. But when you really think about it, it's full of contradictions and oxymorons. It's like a question with no answer.
rimantas 14y ago
That's the same as the question "can schools survive in the age of the book". Education is not technology/media.
- _delirium 14y ago
  That's something I've been thinking about lately. I personally don't learn any better from MOOCs than I do from working my way through a good textbook. So if universities were going to be obsoleted, the printing press is what should've done it, if most people learned like me. However, MOOC advocates are, I presume, betting that for most people a good series of video lectures is a more compelling way of learning than a good textbook. I wonder if it's the modality (visual vs. aural learners, etc.), the social pressure of people "taking a class" together, or something else. edit: For me personally, the biggest advance the internet has brought in autodidacticism is actually mainly on the textual front too: Wikipedia makes it much easier to find and navigate bodies of knowledge, and nicely complements the linear style of learning that you get by working through a textbook. There have long been encyclopedias of course, but Wikipedia is much bigger than most, always at hand, and somehow much easier to get engrossed in.
  - mogrim 14y ago
    I've nothing against a good textbook, but MOOCs are so much more than simply substituting a book for a video - there's the online community, the structure that weekly exercises bring, and the possibility of a (nearly worthless) certificate at the end.
    - deleted 14y ago
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  - rayiner 14y ago
    I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more in these contexts, but there is already precedent for MOOC's: bar study courses. For about $3,000, BarBri will teach you all the law you need to pass the bar. Everyone takes the course, because law schools, ivory towers that they are, don't actually teach you much of the law. BarBri courses include all the things you have with Coursera, etc. Video lectures backed up with a big stack of paper course outlines (for reference), work sheets, online sample questions, assignment submission, etc. My experience with my bar course was that all the online/video stuff is superfluous. The most efficient way to learn the material is not to sit through the video lectures, but to work through the outlines, taking notes and doing practice questions. Text is just a vastly superior format to video for conveying information quickly. The real benefit of the course format is not the online/video crap, but collecting all the information into a series of self-contained outlines. That's the big advantage of the course over just going to a library. Of course we've had paper course outlines for god knows how long. And they haven't replaced law school, even in California where there is no requirement to go to law school. I didn't go to law school to learn the law--that was what BarBri was for. I went to law school to get a name on my resume that would get me a job, connect with professors who could serve as career mentors, and start building my professional network. The education itself is just 10% of the whole purpose of school.
michael_miller 14y ago
MOOCs might replace a traditional university for a few people, but the top universities will remain around. The major benefit to college is not the academics, but the social connections you make. For hackers, this might be meeting a fellow hacker to start a company with. For a director, it might mean meeting an actress to star in a movie. For a businessperson it might mean getting a job at a friend's dad's company. The central idea behind MOOCs is that education is expensive now. It isn't -- just go to the library and pick up a book. Completely free, and if you're disciplined enough, probably pretty close to a university quality education. I'll concede that this doesn't apply to hard science education where you need sophisticated labs, but it does apply to a lot of students' fields of study. When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. You need a nice gym, a welcoming student center, and a nice dorm area for people to socialize. If you were to build a campus solely around education, it would probably be pretty cheap. Just buy up some cheap office space in a nondescript office buildings, and have professors give lectures there. But this isn't what students want.
- columbo 14y ago
  > When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. Unfortunately this expensive-frisbee-throwing-star-gazing-social-networking-package is a requirement to just get past the front door of most places. Some of us really don't need or want the social aspect of college. I'd like to get a BSStat degree and a BMath degree, and I'd like to do this without having to throw a frisbee at someone. At the same time I don't want to get a print-out from <insert shady fly-by-night internet college>. Personally I believe there are more people like me (just give me the degree and keep social networking at the bar) but I don't know if there has been any studies to prove either way.
- s_baby 14y ago
  I see meetme groups forming around MOOC courses. It's not "The College Experience" but it carries much of the same value.
visarg 14y ago
The article is shallow. It starts by casting doubt on the current crop of MOOCs - “if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?” The problem was not the format, it was the accessibility: cost, geographical limitations, time spent going through a full 4 or 5 year program. But the article is worded in such a way as to make MOOCs seem just online versions of the old system. They are not. There was no possibility to listen in small batches, replay, consult hundreds of forum topics on the subject and do it from any computer in the world for free before. In my opinion the only missing thing is coaching. There is something to be said about the psychological impact of a person standing in front of you, giving you his/her full attention. Instead of teachers and TAs we need educational coaches - people who could help us carve a path through the jungle of courses, discover and encourage our strong points, and just plain watch our progress.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I always wonder about headlines like this, schools exist to educate students, if they provide value to the students they will exist. Its the nature of the market. If they don't provide value they will cease to exist (unless maintained by an unholy subsidiary of tax payer money)
- scarmig 14y ago
  Even absent government policy, it's quite possible for contingent organizations to exist long past their sell-by date, because of the ravine their existence has sketched in the market landscape. And with government subsidies--and imagining the American education market as moving toward existing without them is a flight of fancy--they can be disastrously harmful and still continue forever.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Assuming an efficient free market. Which education certainly isn't.
_delirium 14y ago
One thing the article doesn't touch on is how to replace things other than the big, sit-in-an-auditorium style introductory lectures. It's plausible MOOCs are on their way to delivering the equivalent of that educational experience for much less money. But that's really only the introductory part of university curriculum. Just as important imo is the part where you do projects and get hands-on experience. For example, in my senior-level AI class, we had lectures for the first 2/3 of the semester (approximately), and then for the last third, picked a project to do individually or in small teams, and met one-and-one with the professor once a week to develop and carry out our project. That was by far the most educational part of that class. And in physics, the physics lab was just as important as the lecture, possibly even more important when it came to learning how to actually carry out experiments properly. I can imagine that kind of learning being tackled, too, but I think it'll require something considerably more innovative.
- decasteve 14y ago
  All these articles are borne out of the same question: will MOOCs supplant the education system? None ask how can MOOCs and online lectures increase the quality of our education system? What would happen if universities adapt to incorporate these tools? You hit the nail on the head: more projects, more hands-on, more interaction with your professors, more labs, more experiments. The auditorium lectures become redundant thereby freeing up space and time for the aforementioned.
- ippisl 14y ago
  In the "build a search engine using python" online course , people had to do a project,a search engine. some we're really interesting projects(and probably not easy , since the students are new in programming). And if you look at the arduino, many people are doing interesting projects. So i don't think projects are so hard to implement as a part of an online course.
mememememememe 14y ago
What I suspect in the future is a team of really qualified teachers offer short videos online, like those on KhanAchamdey and use them as supplement. But I don't see traditional school disappearing because of jobs and keeping a child at home is very dangerous. Hybrid class runs by having one recitation/dicussion and the rest online. On the recitation day the students have to take a quiz to show they watched the videos. What it killed is daily interaction with others. You can try to do that in college, but not below college. Kids would enjoy to go to school just to see their friends. Another thing is considered is once again jobs. What are you going to do with millions of teachers? If each school makes a video, only 1/1000000 videos will be favored. Online classes have many bad things, and personally I only use it to supplement my college courses.
OSButler 14y ago
The most important asset for a private school is connections. I've experienced schools that were directly tied to the industry, so that the local companies would first go there and check with the teachers to see what student would be suitable for their company, instead of advertising the position through the usual channels. The student would go from graduation right into employment without having to do any actual job search. If you are an institution that has an established connection to the local industry, then I think such a school would be able to survive the online offerings from other international schools/sites.
- Tycho 14y ago
  Also allow wealthy families to network with each other, on top of whatever connections the school itself sets up.
  - OSButler 14y ago
    I'm not sure how that "wealthy families" part fits in with this? Maybe this depends on the country, but one example that relates to my original comment was a school which specialized in university students who are about to or just finished their studies and wanted to enhance their studies in a specific area. The whole program was less than a year and the costs would be easily covered even by a few months of part-time work, so we're not talking having to get an actual loan to even attend.
    - Tycho 14y ago
      I meant private schools as in high-schools. Didn't realize you were talking about schools for adults.
Tycho 14y ago
Finally, mainstream media addresses the elephant in the room re:education.
bpatrianakos 14y ago
The web is possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century and has certainly democratized the way the human race shares knowledge but I don't think online education can ever become a better or more competitive option than traditional offline education. There are unique cases where each is better than the other but I cannot see one overtaking the other. At best I think online education could become almost equal to traditional education but never a more popular or better option. Consider those living in countries where web access is still rare or slow or a challenge to access. Online education isn't viable for these people though it may be in the future. There is no substitute for being educated in the presence of a professor and a room full of students. You could email, IM, video conference, or voice call all day long but web based education takes a bit of the humanity out of the whole experience and it's importance should not be underestimated. Online education makes things more rigid in some ways. An instructor prepares lessons as usual, teaches, then receives feedback from students in the form of questions and their scores on assignments and tests just like usual but theres an advantage to being present in a room full of students. That advantage is that it is far easier to tell if students are catching on and if one or more students are struggling to understand certain concepts then it's easier to sort of improvise and immediately find out and address the cause of any sort of problem. Individual attention suffers with online learning. You can still give individual attention but for many, having someone there makes all the difference. That said, there are just as many benefits to online learning and I have to say, I don't believe one is better than the other, just that they're different and that I don't think either will become endangered any time soon. As someone who went to but did not finish a prestigious university, I think online education should only be sought out in certain circumstances. The experiences you have when attending a traditional university are priceless and cannot be had online. Those experiences aren't part of any curriculum but are an important part of forming the person you will become after graduation. Online education seems, at least to me, better for those needing a cheaper alternative to traditional education. Also those who are unable to physically attend a university due to, again, cost constraints, or their location would also seem to be a good fit as well as those folks who are older, need a more flexible schedule, have difficulty learning in a classroom, and others. I've dome online and traditional education. They compliment each other well and both offer certain things the other doesn't but given the hypothetical choice of choosing all of one and none of the other, I'd take the traditional experience any day. The web is the most incredible thing that's happened to us since the Enlightenment probably but it isn't the cure to all mankind's ills. Online education is certainly a viable alternative to a traditional education but I still don't see it being able to rival or outmatch a traditional education. There are intangibles that come with a traditional education that have no on,one counterpart. So I doubt traditional schools have anything to fear and truly hope they don't.
rprasad 14y ago
Yes, schools will survive in the age of the web. Most people learn via interaction, not passive observation. That's the reason we have homework, and labs, and (at the K12 level) all sorts of silly in-class activities. College education will not change much either. If the purpose of college was simply exposure to factual information, they would never have survived the commercialization of the textbook. Colleges are about higher-level, deeper interaction with the material. (This means different things for different majors.) Moreover, colleges provide a simple, relatively efficient way of proving familiarity or mastery of a subject matter that would be technologically impossible for a web-course to provide (i.e., prevention of most forms of cheating). The web may affect the number of colleges, but it will not affect the fundamental nature of higher education.

29 points by brkumar 14y ago

I can't read this article in the UK. http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png Apparently we're allowed to benefit from the profits they make with the BBC Worldwide service but we're not allowed to actually see the content.

aspratley 14y ago
There's a mirror of it here for UK readers: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401-8a21fd26c668/a5a7c9f72ab6fd97ada76634883cc87f https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401...
- mokash 14y ago
  Cheers. :)
- mykhamill 14y ago
  Thanks :)
Swifty 14y ago
I saw that, and was a bit confused as well. Seeing as I pay my licence fee (to watch any tv, but it only funds the BBC) its a bit annoying that I then cant see other BBC content.

columbo 14y ago

I've taken a few courses through coursera, udacity, racked up points in khan and I've watched some videos from the MIT open source libraries, so the answer to "But what will that mean for traditional institutions?" is they will (hopefully) change dramatically. Imagine having 5,000 students all wanting a MSCS, each student writes out a check for only $20,000 ($5,000 year). So you have $100 million dollars at your disposal for the complete education... what sort of 'online system' could you create for $100 million? Not just video, not just lectures, hell you could make games, interactive puzzles, you could pay to tape some of the brightest minds in the field... and you could change it --every year--. You could offer a better experience for a fraction of the price that students pay today. edit: fixed confusion over 20k

mtgx 14y ago
This Note 10.1 video is pretty inspiring about how kids could learn in the future through games. I really like this idea of learning through games. I think it could be very effective. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0krCDFLjdA&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0krCDFLjdA&feature=plcp
zanny 14y ago
Too bad 99% of student's don't have $20,000 a year lying around, it is why we have an imminent student loan bubble. The more likely scenario is a rapid freefall in education prices (a very good thing, I might add) to near 0, the implementation of global examinations for each grade level and course load rather than just the PSSAs / SAT / AP tests, and the usage of high quality lecture videos with Khan-style infinite question loops to learn material. And you definitely lose the traditional brick and mortar school buildings. They cost so much money when the alternative, aside the bickering about the quality of online learning vs traditional lecture halls, is orders of magnitude less expensive, and even government is subject to economics in the long run.
tomjen3 14y ago
If I was paying 20k/year that is in the same ballpark as a real university + I get all the other stuff, the experince, the connections, the friends, etc. You are more likely looking at 5k/year. At that price point it becomes a posibility for those who can't afford to quit their job and go to school but who still want to improve their life. Then, from there, you can grow the reputation of online school (which still have a huge stigma attached to it).
- deleted 14y ago
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f4stjack 14y ago
Should they? I mean standard lecture format is not a very effective medium. You have to have an uninterrupted concentration on the lecturer to understand the topic. But this rarely happens. You have to write, read the board and listen to teacher for understanding what is being said. I am not even going into the topic of feasibility, you have to pay the teacher, trust that he or she will be in her top condition. And you also have to go to the building for getting the lesson. As you've said, a better system could be built with less cost. And contrary to the popular opinion it would be better.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I think I would have done better at school if there had been a camera at the back of the class and ability to download the videos later. Firstly, people tend to talk a lot in class. This is distracting and makes it difficult to hear what is being said. Perhaps if there was a recoding nobody would want their rude behaviour documented. When listening to a class it is also very easy for your concentration to wander for long enough that you have trouble keeping up with the rest of the lecture because you missed something. A video trivially allows your to rewind those minutes.

byoung2 14y ago

As the author and technology theorist Ian Bogost argued earlier this year, "if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?" A good analogy would be newspapers vs news websites. In the end, it is still the same news, but online it is more up-to-date, globally accessible, and more convenient to access. Lectures suck when they're at 8am and if you miss them they're gone forever. They also can't be paused or fast-forwarded. But most importantly, they only happen in one location. Putting them online puts them in the hands of students across the globe, and gives them the ability to watch them at any time, at their own pace.

rimantas 14y ago
You did nice job listing why lecturers suck. Now try and list why your teaching videos suck.
- byoung2 14y ago
  Improving is an iterative process. You find problems, solve them, and then find more. Videos suck because they're static, they don't answer questions. So you make them adaptive. And so on.

ronyeh 14y ago

As Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a September article for the MIT Technology Review: “If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?” Maybe popular TV shows like Jersey Shore should contain public service announcements like "Snooki says: reading is fun!" Or maybe we need more on-screen text in games like Call of Duty & Halo. For example, you can't complete a particular objective unless you figure out that a paragraph of text tells you to look up a "code word" from page 6 of a real book like The Lorax. Schools and teachers aren't our problem. If parents and kids aren't intrinsically motivated to learn, how can you force them to? I hope that more American parents will convince their kids to take education seriously, or else many other countries (with access to American online courses) will eventually surpass us.

mnemonicsloth 14y ago
All people are intrinsically motivated to learn. People can give up wealth, sex, and addictive drugs. We can fast. We can even stop breathing for a little while -- or longer, with a little planning. But short of suicide, you can't stop thinking about the world around you.
- samatman 14y ago
  Actually, learning to stop this process is the goal of several systems of meditation. It is by no means an easy thing to do, but it can be done, for short periods of time, and feels great.
  - bpatrianakos 14y ago
    Mthe goal or process of meditation is kind of an oxymoron. You actually are learning. You're learning to stop thinking briefly. And how do you do it? By thinking about not thinking. How do you that? Concentrate on your breath. The whole thing is very strange. You're thinking but you aren't. You're learning but you aren't. I don't doubt that it feels great and I accept that it is a beneficial thing to do. But when you really think about it, it's full of contradictions and oxymorons. It's like a question with no answer.

rimantas 14y ago

That's the same as the question "can schools survive in the age of the book". Education is not technology/media.

_delirium 14y ago
That's something I've been thinking about lately. I personally don't learn any better from MOOCs than I do from working my way through a good textbook. So if universities were going to be obsoleted, the printing press is what should've done it, if most people learned like me. However, MOOC advocates are, I presume, betting that for most people a good series of video lectures is a more compelling way of learning than a good textbook. I wonder if it's the modality (visual vs. aural learners, etc.), the social pressure of people "taking a class" together, or something else. edit: For me personally, the biggest advance the internet has brought in autodidacticism is actually mainly on the textual front too: Wikipedia makes it much easier to find and navigate bodies of knowledge, and nicely complements the linear style of learning that you get by working through a textbook. There have long been encyclopedias of course, but Wikipedia is much bigger than most, always at hand, and somehow much easier to get engrossed in.
- mogrim 14y ago
  I've nothing against a good textbook, but MOOCs are so much more than simply substituting a book for a video - there's the online community, the structure that weekly exercises bring, and the possibility of a (nearly worthless) certificate at the end.
  - deleted 14y ago
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- rayiner 14y ago
  I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more in these contexts, but there is already precedent for MOOC's: bar study courses. For about $3,000, BarBri will teach you all the law you need to pass the bar. Everyone takes the course, because law schools, ivory towers that they are, don't actually teach you much of the law. BarBri courses include all the things you have with Coursera, etc. Video lectures backed up with a big stack of paper course outlines (for reference), work sheets, online sample questions, assignment submission, etc. My experience with my bar course was that all the online/video stuff is superfluous. The most efficient way to learn the material is not to sit through the video lectures, but to work through the outlines, taking notes and doing practice questions. Text is just a vastly superior format to video for conveying information quickly. The real benefit of the course format is not the online/video crap, but collecting all the information into a series of self-contained outlines. That's the big advantage of the course over just going to a library. Of course we've had paper course outlines for god knows how long. And they haven't replaced law school, even in California where there is no requirement to go to law school. I didn't go to law school to learn the law--that was what BarBri was for. I went to law school to get a name on my resume that would get me a job, connect with professors who could serve as career mentors, and start building my professional network. The education itself is just 10% of the whole purpose of school.

michael_miller 14y ago

MOOCs might replace a traditional university for a few people, but the top universities will remain around. The major benefit to college is not the academics, but the social connections you make. For hackers, this might be meeting a fellow hacker to start a company with. For a director, it might mean meeting an actress to star in a movie. For a businessperson it might mean getting a job at a friend's dad's company. The central idea behind MOOCs is that education is expensive now. It isn't -- just go to the library and pick up a book. Completely free, and if you're disciplined enough, probably pretty close to a university quality education. I'll concede that this doesn't apply to hard science education where you need sophisticated labs, but it does apply to a lot of students' fields of study. When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. You need a nice gym, a welcoming student center, and a nice dorm area for people to socialize. If you were to build a campus solely around education, it would probably be pretty cheap. Just buy up some cheap office space in a nondescript office buildings, and have professors give lectures there. But this isn't what students want.

columbo 14y ago
> When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. Unfortunately this expensive-frisbee-throwing-star-gazing-social-networking-package is a requirement to just get past the front door of most places. Some of us really don't need or want the social aspect of college. I'd like to get a BSStat degree and a BMath degree, and I'd like to do this without having to throw a frisbee at someone. At the same time I don't want to get a print-out from <insert shady fly-by-night internet college>. Personally I believe there are more people like me (just give me the degree and keep social networking at the bar) but I don't know if there has been any studies to prove either way.
s_baby 14y ago
I see meetme groups forming around MOOC courses. It's not "The College Experience" but it carries much of the same value.

visarg 14y ago

The article is shallow. It starts by casting doubt on the current crop of MOOCs - “if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?” The problem was not the format, it was the accessibility: cost, geographical limitations, time spent going through a full 4 or 5 year program. But the article is worded in such a way as to make MOOCs seem just online versions of the old system. They are not. There was no possibility to listen in small batches, replay, consult hundreds of forum topics on the subject and do it from any computer in the world for free before. In my opinion the only missing thing is coaching. There is something to be said about the psychological impact of a person standing in front of you, giving you his/her full attention. Instead of teachers and TAs we need educational coaches - people who could help us carve a path through the jungle of courses, discover and encourage our strong points, and just plain watch our progress.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I always wonder about headlines like this, schools exist to educate students, if they provide value to the students they will exist. Its the nature of the market. If they don't provide value they will cease to exist (unless maintained by an unholy subsidiary of tax payer money)

scarmig 14y ago
Even absent government policy, it's quite possible for contingent organizations to exist long past their sell-by date, because of the ravine their existence has sketched in the market landscape. And with government subsidies--and imagining the American education market as moving toward existing without them is a flight of fancy--they can be disastrously harmful and still continue forever.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Assuming an efficient free market. Which education certainly isn't.

_delirium 14y ago

One thing the article doesn't touch on is how to replace things other than the big, sit-in-an-auditorium style introductory lectures. It's plausible MOOCs are on their way to delivering the equivalent of that educational experience for much less money. But that's really only the introductory part of university curriculum. Just as important imo is the part where you do projects and get hands-on experience. For example, in my senior-level AI class, we had lectures for the first 2/3 of the semester (approximately), and then for the last third, picked a project to do individually or in small teams, and met one-and-one with the professor once a week to develop and carry out our project. That was by far the most educational part of that class. And in physics, the physics lab was just as important as the lecture, possibly even more important when it came to learning how to actually carry out experiments properly. I can imagine that kind of learning being tackled, too, but I think it'll require something considerably more innovative.

decasteve 14y ago
All these articles are borne out of the same question: will MOOCs supplant the education system? None ask how can MOOCs and online lectures increase the quality of our education system? What would happen if universities adapt to incorporate these tools? You hit the nail on the head: more projects, more hands-on, more interaction with your professors, more labs, more experiments. The auditorium lectures become redundant thereby freeing up space and time for the aforementioned.
ippisl 14y ago
In the "build a search engine using python" online course , people had to do a project,a search engine. some we're really interesting projects(and probably not easy , since the students are new in programming). And if you look at the arduino, many people are doing interesting projects. So i don't think projects are so hard to implement as a part of an online course.

mememememememe 14y ago

What I suspect in the future is a team of really qualified teachers offer short videos online, like those on KhanAchamdey and use them as supplement. But I don't see traditional school disappearing because of jobs and keeping a child at home is very dangerous. Hybrid class runs by having one recitation/dicussion and the rest online. On the recitation day the students have to take a quiz to show they watched the videos. What it killed is daily interaction with others. You can try to do that in college, but not below college. Kids would enjoy to go to school just to see their friends. Another thing is considered is once again jobs. What are you going to do with millions of teachers? If each school makes a video, only 1/1000000 videos will be favored. Online classes have many bad things, and personally I only use it to supplement my college courses.

OSButler 14y ago

The most important asset for a private school is connections. I've experienced schools that were directly tied to the industry, so that the local companies would first go there and check with the teachers to see what student would be suitable for their company, instead of advertising the position through the usual channels. The student would go from graduation right into employment without having to do any actual job search. If you are an institution that has an established connection to the local industry, then I think such a school would be able to survive the online offerings from other international schools/sites.

Tycho 14y ago
Also allow wealthy families to network with each other, on top of whatever connections the school itself sets up.
- OSButler 14y ago
  I'm not sure how that "wealthy families" part fits in with this? Maybe this depends on the country, but one example that relates to my original comment was a school which specialized in university students who are about to or just finished their studies and wanted to enhance their studies in a specific area. The whole program was less than a year and the costs would be easily covered even by a few months of part-time work, so we're not talking having to get an actual loan to even attend.
  - Tycho 14y ago
    I meant private schools as in high-schools. Didn't realize you were talking about schools for adults.

Tycho 14y ago

Finally, mainstream media addresses the elephant in the room re:education.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

The web is possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century and has certainly democratized the way the human race shares knowledge but I don't think online education can ever become a better or more competitive option than traditional offline education. There are unique cases where each is better than the other but I cannot see one overtaking the other. At best I think online education could become almost equal to traditional education but never a more popular or better option. Consider those living in countries where web access is still rare or slow or a challenge to access. Online education isn't viable for these people though it may be in the future. There is no substitute for being educated in the presence of a professor and a room full of students. You could email, IM, video conference, or voice call all day long but web based education takes a bit of the humanity out of the whole experience and it's importance should not be underestimated. Online education makes things more rigid in some ways. An instructor prepares lessons as usual, teaches, then receives feedback from students in the form of questions and their scores on assignments and tests just like usual but theres an advantage to being present in a room full of students. That advantage is that it is far easier to tell if students are catching on and if one or more students are struggling to understand certain concepts then it's easier to sort of improvise and immediately find out and address the cause of any sort of problem. Individual attention suffers with online learning. You can still give individual attention but for many, having someone there makes all the difference. That said, there are just as many benefits to online learning and I have to say, I don't believe one is better than the other, just that they're different and that I don't think either will become endangered any time soon. As someone who went to but did not finish a prestigious university, I think online education should only be sought out in certain circumstances. The experiences you have when attending a traditional university are priceless and cannot be had online. Those experiences aren't part of any curriculum but are an important part of forming the person you will become after graduation. Online education seems, at least to me, better for those needing a cheaper alternative to traditional education. Also those who are unable to physically attend a university due to, again, cost constraints, or their location would also seem to be a good fit as well as those folks who are older, need a more flexible schedule, have difficulty learning in a classroom, and others. I've dome online and traditional education. They compliment each other well and both offer certain things the other doesn't but given the hypothetical choice of choosing all of one and none of the other, I'd take the traditional experience any day. The web is the most incredible thing that's happened to us since the Enlightenment probably but it isn't the cure to all mankind's ills. Online education is certainly a viable alternative to a traditional education but I still don't see it being able to rival or outmatch a traditional education. There are intangibles that come with a traditional education that have no on,one counterpart. So I doubt traditional schools have anything to fear and truly hope they don't.

rprasad 14y ago

Yes, schools will survive in the age of the web. Most people learn via interaction, not passive observation. That's the reason we have homework, and labs, and (at the K12 level) all sorts of silly in-class activities. College education will not change much either. If the purpose of college was simply exposure to factual information, they would never have survived the commercialization of the textbook. Colleges are about higher-level, deeper interaction with the material. (This means different things for different majors.) Moreover, colleges provide a simple, relatively efficient way of proving familiarity or mastery of a subject matter that would be technologically impossible for a web-course to provide (i.e., prevention of most forms of cheating). The web may affect the number of colleges, but it will not affect the fundamental nature of higher education.