I think about this all the time, haha. I think right now my ideal higher education solution would be somewhere where all of the resources you need are online and you can go at your own pace, so if you need to take time off it's no big deal. Then you have a central location where your fellow students and professors/TAs/experts/whatever are there to help you learn and answer questions, not to lecture to a huge room where 75% of the people are on their phones.
My big prediction for education is that a lot of research universities are going to move large lecture halls online (think chem 101, etc) with labs, seminars, and discussions with lower number of slots to abide with moderate social distancing requirements. It provides the primary educational content of lecture, and provides in person opportunities that students desire.
Once we see students and professors like this format compared to either all in person or all online, I think it will stick around. There's clearly a need for both improved efficiencies as well as the desire to have real human interaction, and I suspect this Fall we'll have the golden opportunity to really experiment with it.
I think this could also be applied to education and not just working in due time.
Obviously for labs and hands on experience you will still want to go physically to your university, however I envision a future where all you need to do to go to class each day is pop on a pair of VR glasses and you are in a hall with all the other students listening to the professors lectures.
Granted there are self learning / online courses already to mitigate commuting to learn, however I believe the next step in education should be a VR college.
A few loosely related thoughts as to why I'm fond of the University system (in response to the negative tone of some of the comments here and at techcrunch):
- It's the only socially acceptable way to spend years simply learning as a full time job.
- The argument that "lectures will soon be online" only makes sense if you believe that physically being present in lectures is the way that people gain knowledge in school.
- University admissions maintain a level of intelligence in incoming classes that I don't think an online community ever could - so that the students who interact at a university are interacting in a productive way.
- Physical colocation is just a better way of interacting with people than communicating online is.
This is why I would love to see colleges move to a hybrid model, where they handle the things they're good at -- office hours, discussions, providing a community, that sort of thing -- and use the internet for stuff like delivering canned lectures.
There's so much potential in a better university/college.
Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Heck, we could even hire professional actors that would both help with engagement and with representation problems in various fields.
Then in addition to being places of research, universities become the places we go to facilitate taking those courses and applying the knowledge. Watch the interactive videos, and expert tutors help you understand challenging topics, guide you where to look next, and facilitate labs. At least for undergraduate, this seems much better than what we have now.
And then, why not open it up to everyone? We could all take various courses throughout our lives. I'd love to be continuously taking classes in new fields, but the world isn't set up that way.
> Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen.
There's no substitute for in-person education. For years, I heard from the online education cheerleaders that online can be better. Online can be a quality experience, but you can't build the same relationships, develop the same comfort with asking questions, or deliver the same set of intangibles in an online setting.
That said, I think hybrid classes are probably better. Some material is better taught in an async fashion. The big limitation of in-person education is that you have no choice but to schedule a fixed block of time for meetings. The flexibility of async means students can go through certain types of material at the right pace for themselves.
> it seems that startups like edX, Coursera, etc. have not really been successes
These options aren't university classes. They're the next generation of textbooks.
I could see online education supplementing, rather than replacing the college experience. Based on my experience at a large public university (UCLA), my first two years was spent skipping classes that were held in large lecture halls with 200+ students. I ended up learning 10 weeks of material in the week before midterms and finals. A lot of this lower division coursework could easily have been replaced with online lectures. Maybe what we'll see emerge is an online junior college with the ability to let students "transfer-in" to finish their degree in 2 years.
There are a couple of things I can get from attending uni that I can't get from learning online.
- Focus - Sitting at the computer it is very easily to be distracted trying to pick up a challenging new concept. I find this even more true about things I don't derive any immediate benefit from, as in it is easier to concentrate on learning a library I'm going to use in a freelance project than say an obscure statistical model for a class. Sitting in the lecture give me that chance to clear my head from most distractions and focus on the content.
- Mindset - I head into uni, it usually gets me in the right mindset for learning and completing tasks. I don't get that sitting at home.
I would also add the guidance of some lecturers/ supervisors but this point really depends where you are. I can't say in my own experience this couldn't have been replaced online although their are moments when having such experienced teachers can help.
Edit- I would also add that these issues could be solved by getting together at a co-working space with some like minded others. I guess a hybrid model like that could have some merit, the educational institute acts as a network to connect like minded people for online study. Maybe they could also have a staff member that has a hands off role and just answers questions over email for a much reduced fee over the traditional system.
I would have loved to earn a degree by watching lectures online of the best teachers, and then having, instead of lecture hours offered in-person, an interactive Q&A session.
But what would be the best is if you are allowed to skip ahead lectures, etc at your own pace. The competitive incentive here would have been a big extra motivator.
Of course, you cant blame stagnating scientific discovery, stagnating prosperity, and soaring academic costs on the Academic Complex. Teachers, especially, are beyond reproach.
I'm not sure what physical space has to do with a boom in education. The long term trend is that economic downturns lead to a boom in higher education. That's just a fact of life.
Schools, right now, are being forced online with all goods and services, which is uncharted territory for most of them. Whether it's old-timey faculty dragging their feet because in-person is better than online (it is, by the way), or because some classes just can't be offered online (without critically thinking about it I would argue), or because we've just done things this way forever. Whatever the reason, higher ed is being forced to think about things in ways it never has before. Institutions are desperately snatching up online resources right now like crazy.
My argument is that when the boom comes in the next six months, all colleges and universities are going to look to build resiliency and responsiveness in certain areas related to critical student facing infrastructure. This means online. This means external services.
We're big, we're slow, we're out of touch with reality, but one thing we don't do, in individual institutions in higher education, is make the same mistake twice. That, at least, we're good at.
This is part of the reason why I think the level of investment needs to remain high. College performs a complex task. It can't just be replaced by coursera.
I do think that in-person lectures, course design and such need a total overhaul. Modern technology does change the equation. In-person lectures no longer make sense, for example. That doesn't mean in-person college doesn't make sense.
I think co-location is a valuable part of education, and that while online lectures will revolutionize education the best programs will still have central locations were students gather and some amount of in person teaching. Good telepresence is a counter argument, but I don't think it will be enough to simulate living in the same building as other intelligent people with similar interests and the uniting goal of learning.
Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions.
I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular delivering lectures. I don't think the main benefit of being on campus is the lectures or coming up with assignments, instead (as another comment noted) it's the peers and the people you interact with and how they help you learn. And so by automating away the rote part of it and focusing on the creative (research, TAing, peer interaction), it seems like we should be able to create better outcomes.
Perhaps online colleges could replace impersonal experiences at large institutions while freeing up more opportunities for those who really would benefit from smaller classes. Alternately, the education bubble might just continue to swell. Then, those who can't afford the increasingly exclusive, expensive and, therefore, grade-inflated campus experience might be told there is no real problem since they can just 'learn online for free.'
Further, the fact that you managed to learn without small classrooms, contact with professors and a formative campus experience doesn't mean that you wouldn't have benefited from those things. For example, I don't think it's meaningless hand waving to talk about being able to go to Alfred Aho's office hours and ask him pretty much anything you want and get an impromptu interactive lecture. The people who seek out office hours of this sort are often those who are voracious learners who do learn on their own and want to keep learning more.
As for having to rush back and forth or not being in the comfort of your own home, I'd say that comfort is not necessarily synonymous with personal benefit.
I feel that there will always be a place for the university - the original need, to connect students with teachers, is a powerful one. The question is in what form this need is met, and it will determine which universities live or die. We have proven that to some extent computing infrastructure is able to shoulder some of the heavy load of education and instruction. Therefore, I predict that in-person universities will become places of human connection and specific, personalized learning.
The basic building blocks, such as libraries and lecture halls, will be significantly transformed into collaborative, social, and study spaces better suited to the needs of connected students. In-university research might be supplanted with cross-university collaboration in shared labs and spaces, with traditional office needs largely being met by computers. The university probably isn't going away any time soon, but I feel like the relationships inside of it are going to be significantly rewired.
"As a solution, Gelernter proposes moving all of human knowledge to online servers so that the in-person college experience can be replaced by user-driven self-education."
To be fair, while this works great for certain subjects like computer science, there are things you can't learn online. Medicine, chemistry, biology, experimental physics and most of engineering require labs and tools and a level of personal oversight or interaction that's just not accessible to young people otherwise. You might be able to get rid of lecture halls in the long run, but you'll never get rid of labs.
A university teacher. I work from the office for now but without student. I understand the appeal of online classes but man do I miss in-person teaching. In an online class, there's virtually no reaction from students (as most students here prefer to turn the camera off) and I feel like I'm a YouTuber who's constantly talking to an empty camera.
If I ever return to school, I'm going to want what I didn't get nearly enough of in my undergraduate degree: in-person access to professors.
I don't want college credit for browsing the web and watching videos. I want coaching, feedback and interaction from people with deep knowledge in their field.
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