Breathless commentators are giddy foreseeing the future of higher education as a series of online courses tailored to fit student needs. The university, they proclaim, is virtually dead http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/guest-post-an-arab-spring-of-free-online-higher-education/2012/02/03/gIQAXiOFnQ_blog.html
We need only wait, say they, to see if online content resembles an Amazon model or an Ebay model.
It's amazing that supposedly smart people get away with such balderdash.
First, a bit of history. When I was interviewing for jobs 15 years ago, I sat on an airplane next to a guy who was recording the world's best professors at top universities. He wondered why I was even bothering with a career that would soon die because everyone would pay to watch videos of the best teachers. Hmmmm. Well, I'm still here, and I see "great lecture" courses offered for extremely steep discounts.
So, now the trend is toward offering videos or "courses" online for free for low charge. Perhaps this should be labeled the "Wikipedia" model. I've looked at a couple of these, including MIT's "every course is online" project and the "Kahn Academy." I'm deeply unimpressed. The video lectures seem well-done, but there are two fundamental problems.
1-Learning requires interactivity. Watching a video is very different from interacting with a faculty member and fellow students in class. These videos perpetuate the worst possible teaching techniques: lecturing to a disconnected audience. That's not what higher education is, and online videos are free or cheap because that's their basic value: close to zero. The really valuable resource is the time of smart people, both students and faculty, and that's a very limited resource.
2-The proliferation of videos will lead to the same problem Wikipedia faces: low information about the quality of an article. When I read a Wikipedia article, I learn stuff. But I am always amazed at the level of contestation going on about virtually every article. Monitors regularly point to unsubstantiated or disputed "facts" or interpretations and most discussions about the problems seem to bog down in interminable debates. One can never be sure about the quality of the information. And, for topics, I know something about, Wikipedia barely grazes the surface, so the safe assumption is that the information is fairly low quality. Something can be reasonably fair and correct, by the way, and still be low-quality.
So, there you go: If you want lectures with low levels of interaction and uncertain quality, nearly free online education looks very promising indeed. For something of quality, I expect folks will need to pay.
