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Re: the prediction, it's possible, but these predictions have been coming out since the '60s at least, and renewed every decade. With the advent of videorecorde

Re: the prediction, it's possible, but these predictions have been coming out since the '60s at least, and renewed every decade. With the advent of videorecorded lectures, one vision of the future was that there would be no more need for every school to have professors giving local physics lectures, for example, and instead everyone would just watch videos of someone like Feynman. That didn't quite happen, though, even though video lectures have been available for a long time. People do use them for self-study (even the 1964 Feynman lectures, which were only audio-recorded, are popular for that purpose), but typically for personal enrichment type purposes: study outside one's own specialty, weekend study post-college, etc. (I personally don't use them at all, because I use an even older technology for self-study: the textbook.) If MOOCs succeed to a larger extent than video-lectures did, I think it will have to be by providing something other than just recorded lectures, which has been tried many times already.

VLM 13y ago
True, but, the interesting new ability is being able to externalize the costs. Don't like my linear algebra lecture, go watch Strang. For free. In the "olden days" we used to pay profs, in some cases cash collection, in exchange for hundreds of pages of photocopied text. Now you can distribute a video, with someone else paying bandwidth both up and down for the cost of putting a URL on the class website or in a class email, which is kind of impressive. There is an amusing meta "loop" that I was watching the FPGA video lecture series at home last week and during a video distributed so motivated students can self-teach, the prof was very unhappily complaining about students being too lazy to look up a simple .pdf datasheet for a temperature sensor so he was providing the information now as part of his notes or something along those lines. So it would be possible that the same students too lazy to google for a simple device datasheet would never be motivated enough to watch a video lecture. There are other alternatives. Profs used to be graded on how well they used high tech multimedia, I could see a prof editing a MOOC-type or EDx-type video down to fill 80% of their class time and then spending most of the class time showing a video and then 15% or so answering questions or expanding upon topics or whatever. I think the parasitic book industry would be very unhappy were they replaced by free web videos, so we can pretty much expect a very expensive video service to appear. Parasites gotta be parasites.

VLM 13y ago

True, but, the interesting new ability is being able to externalize the costs. Don't like my linear algebra lecture, go watch Strang. For free. In the "olden days" we used to pay profs, in some cases cash collection, in exchange for hundreds of pages of photocopied text. Now you can distribute a video, with someone else paying bandwidth both up and down for the cost of putting a URL on the class website or in a class email, which is kind of impressive. There is an amusing meta "loop" that I was watching the FPGA video lecture series at home last week and during a video distributed so motivated students can self-teach, the prof was very unhappily complaining about students being too lazy to look up a simple .pdf datasheet for a temperature sensor so he was providing the information now as part of his notes or something along those lines. So it would be possible that the same students too lazy to google for a simple device datasheet would never be motivated enough to watch a video lecture. There are other alternatives. Profs used to be graded on how well they used high tech multimedia, I could see a prof editing a MOOC-type or EDx-type video down to fill 80% of their class time and then spending most of the class time showing a video and then 15% or so answering questions or expanding upon topics or whatever. I think the parasitic book industry would be very unhappy were they replaced by free web videos, so we can pretty much expect a very expensive video service to appear. Parasites gotta be parasites.