5 ms·

Burn Baby Burn

76 points by queensnake 17y ago

xiaoma 17y ago
This reminds me of the piece on StraighterLine, which allows students to take as many online courses they like and complete them at whatever rate they like for $99/month. It's accredited, too. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php?page=1 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/colle...
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
It seems so tantalizingly close, doesn't it? To replace the revered institutions of higher learning in this country with laptops and Starbucks cards, throwing the gates of prosperity and knowledge wide open for anyone who cares to partake. 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.
- jerf 17y ago
  "But I'm afraid it won't happen for awhile" 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.)
  - ijhoh 17y ago
    True - what we need is 500 years of experience of university knowledge available for free on some sort of free, static display, random access information retrieval system. Where anyone can sit down and just read the data directly. Not sure what to call the volumes but you could store them in a modified tape library - without the tapes
wallflower 17y ago
> What drives the education industry is producing degrees 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"
- ube 17y ago
  Well the Primer will certainly not be a kindle...an apple tablet maybe :-) . All kidding aside, Stephenson's book more focuses on kids without easy access to education getting the power of education. Its more along the OLPC route.
- bayareaguy 17y ago
  Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential lies with his the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer 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.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    Of course, Stephenson also slyly suggested that the ideal remote-teacher-to-remote-student ratio remains one to one: Miranda sacrificed her career to raise Nell, remotely. 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.
    - bayareaguy 17y ago
David 17y ago
Do we really want to eliminate the physical university? 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 http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html [edited for grammar]
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  I don't, but I would like to eliminate the enrollment. I personally feel that universities should offer more ad-hoc participation and function like giant libraries rather than toytowns for those who can afford to make a 4 year commitment.
- brfox 17y ago
  Agreed! Most of my real ah-ha insights came after struggling for many hours of doing physics problem sets with a small group of classmates. I think that this is one of the most difficult-to-recreate parts of college.
- ube 17y ago
  That's a very good point. I went to a state university - for the first 2 years I was a commuter and the last 2 years I stayed at a dorm. It was 2 different worlds. For the first 2 years, I felt it was more a continuation of high school (i.e. when you get your driver's license and you don't need to get on the yellow bus). The last 2 years were a partial step into the "real world" - deal with an annoying roommate who has the TV on all the time and negotiate, chat with professors after class without hurrying home, socialize beyond interaction in class.
mhb 17y ago
Why wasn't he asking this question when textbooks started to be published? Just give all the physics students Feynmann's Lectures on Physics and a few other textbooks and they can educate themselves. Hire a professor to handle the occasional question. Does the existence of online video make this so much more compelling?
- msie 17y ago
  Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know. 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.
  - gwern 17y ago
    > Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know. Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.
- mhb 17y ago
  Just to expand on this a bit. It reminds me of the distinction Papert makes (e.g., Mindstorms or essays (http://www.papert.org/works.html) http://www.papert.org/works.html)) between his vision of how computers could empower education and how they are currently being used. 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.
- 10ren 17y ago
  Yes, why can't we franchise a university? 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.
tybris 17y ago
Academia is more about shaping your mind than learning material. Going to a lecture is also not a very effective way to learn material. What is important about lectures, assignments and tests is the social aspect. Everyone will attend the same topic at the same time at the sample place, setting you up for a (direct or indirect) discussion with your peers or your professor. This will not only force you to really think about the topic, but also introduce you to viewpoints your mind was not yet capable of producing. What makes a university good is what your, your peers and your professors have to offer. 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.
jokull 17y ago
Internships can also cover a lot of what the universities are trying to cover. A group of interns can also cover a lot of the social aspects a lot of people here claim would be missing from our society if it weren't for uni's.
flashingpumpkin 17y ago
The author kinda forgets that there's also branches of study that can't really be pursued from wherever you are but actually need facilities. Think of chemistry for example.
flipper 17y ago
Well, it is already happening. 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.

76 points by queensnake 17y ago

This reminds me of the piece on StraighterLine, which allows students to take as many online courses they like and complete them at whatever rate they like for $99/month. It's accredited, too. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php?page=1 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/colle...

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

It seems so tantalizingly close, doesn't it? To replace the revered institutions of higher learning in this country with laptops and Starbucks cards, throwing the gates of prosperity and knowledge wide open for anyone who cares to partake. 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.

jerf 17y ago
"But I'm afraid it won't happen for awhile" 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.)
- ijhoh 17y ago
  True - what we need is 500 years of experience of university knowledge available for free on some sort of free, static display, random access information retrieval system. Where anyone can sit down and just read the data directly. Not sure what to call the volumes but you could store them in a modified tape library - without the tapes

wallflower 17y ago

> What drives the education industry is producing degrees 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"

ube 17y ago
Well the Primer will certainly not be a kindle...an apple tablet maybe :-) . All kidding aside, Stephenson's book more focuses on kids without easy access to education getting the power of education. Its more along the OLPC route.
bayareaguy 17y ago
Neal Stephenson offered a tantalizing look at where the potential lies with his the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer 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.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Of course, Stephenson also slyly suggested that the ideal remote-teacher-to-remote-student ratio remains one to one: Miranda sacrificed her career to raise Nell, remotely. 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.
  - bayareaguy 17y ago

David 17y ago

Do we really want to eliminate the physical university? 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 http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html [edited for grammar]

anigbrowl 17y ago
I don't, but I would like to eliminate the enrollment. I personally feel that universities should offer more ad-hoc participation and function like giant libraries rather than toytowns for those who can afford to make a 4 year commitment.
brfox 17y ago
Agreed! Most of my real ah-ha insights came after struggling for many hours of doing physics problem sets with a small group of classmates. I think that this is one of the most difficult-to-recreate parts of college.
ube 17y ago
That's a very good point. I went to a state university - for the first 2 years I was a commuter and the last 2 years I stayed at a dorm. It was 2 different worlds. For the first 2 years, I felt it was more a continuation of high school (i.e. when you get your driver's license and you don't need to get on the yellow bus). The last 2 years were a partial step into the "real world" - deal with an annoying roommate who has the TV on all the time and negotiate, chat with professors after class without hurrying home, socialize beyond interaction in class.

mhb 17y ago

Why wasn't he asking this question when textbooks started to be published? Just give all the physics students Feynmann's Lectures on Physics and a few other textbooks and they can educate themselves. Hire a professor to handle the occasional question. Does the existence of online video make this so much more compelling?

msie 17y ago
Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know. 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.
- gwern 17y ago
  > Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know. Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.
mhb 17y ago
Just to expand on this a bit. It reminds me of the distinction Papert makes (e.g., Mindstorms or essays (http://www.papert.org/works.html) http://www.papert.org/works.html)) between his vision of how computers could empower education and how they are currently being used. 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.
10ren 17y ago
Yes, why can't we franchise a university? 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.

tybris 17y ago

Academia is more about shaping your mind than learning material. Going to a lecture is also not a very effective way to learn material. What is important about lectures, assignments and tests is the social aspect. Everyone will attend the same topic at the same time at the sample place, setting you up for a (direct or indirect) discussion with your peers or your professor. This will not only force you to really think about the topic, but also introduce you to viewpoints your mind was not yet capable of producing. What makes a university good is what your, your peers and your professors have to offer. 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.

jokull 17y ago

Internships can also cover a lot of what the universities are trying to cover. A group of interns can also cover a lot of the social aspects a lot of people here claim would be missing from our society if it weren't for uni's.

flashingpumpkin 17y ago

The author kinda forgets that there's also branches of study that can't really be pursued from wherever you are but actually need facilities. Think of chemistry for example.

flipper 17y ago

Well, it is already happening. 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.