> Inspiration and community are the best parts of school, and they are nowhere to be found.
Yes. Other things not found:
* Program structure
* Incentive for passing your courses (i.e. getting kicked out of school)
* Brand recognition associated with a diploma, to help you land a good job
* Keg parties
* Networking with classmates, alumni, and, if you're lucky, professors, to help you land a good job
For these reasons, and others, MOOCs in their current form don't pose an immediate threat to colleges.
Still, I think technology could be leveraged to make traditional programs more efficient.
For instance, university professors serve two functions: they spend most of their time and effort doing research, then they also have to deliver calculus/biology/whatever lectures to undergrads. In practice, the overlap between great researchers and great lecturers is often small. Why not supplement undergraduate education using canonical lectures from the very best speakers? I imagine some students are already doing this, by watching Khan Academy or pulling the lectures from MOOCs that feature better speakers than their professors.
Also, as tablet/e-reader screens continue to improve, digital textbooks will likely become more prevalent. There is so much room for improvement of digital textbooks by abandoning the one-to-one mapping from paper textbooks; specifically, by using multimedia more effectively and providing interactive examples. Further, adaptive or interactive problem sets would provide a rich set of data to identify where students get lost. A/B testing could identify which presentations are most effective. There's a lot to be done here.
Getting kicked out of school is something we need to replicate? Heck no.
You either have the motovation to learn or you don't, but the point of online learning is to let people figure that out themselves. We absolutely do not need some ridiculous system of gating access when we won't need it.
Yes. Other things not found:
* Program structure
* Incentive for passing your courses (i.e. getting kicked out of school)
* Brand recognition associated with a diploma, to help you land a good job
* Keg parties
* Networking with classmates, alumni, and, if you're lucky, professors, to help you land a good job
For these reasons, and others, MOOCs in their current form don't pose an immediate threat to colleges.
Still, I think technology could be leveraged to make traditional programs more efficient.
For instance, university professors serve two functions: they spend most of their time and effort doing research, then they also have to deliver calculus/biology/whatever lectures to undergrads. In practice, the overlap between great researchers and great lecturers is often small. Why not supplement undergraduate education using canonical lectures from the very best speakers? I imagine some students are already doing this, by watching Khan Academy or pulling the lectures from MOOCs that feature better speakers than their professors.
Also, as tablet/e-reader screens continue to improve, digital textbooks will likely become more prevalent. There is so much room for improvement of digital textbooks by abandoning the one-to-one mapping from paper textbooks; specifically, by using multimedia more effectively and providing interactive examples. Further, adaptive or interactive problem sets would provide a rich set of data to identify where students get lost. A/B testing could identify which presentations are most effective. There's a lot to be done here.