Ivan Illich actually writes about a plan for education via online social networking in his book Deschooling Society. He talks about finding other people with similar interests using a computer and then meeting up to study with them. He actually describes it as a web, which is pretty impressive considering he published in 1970, 20 years before the term was even coined.
I think it would actually be a fun experiment to get a bunch of people on this site together for a week or so in summer, maybe read through five or so books over the course of a week living together. I think that would potentially be a better model for education than just putting lectures online.
I think the main problem is that this presupposes that people go to college to learn. Most don't. They go to get a degree.
Degrees act as passports to jobs. Employers value degrees because of their scarcity and the work/selection involved in getting one. Give away too many, and they won't anymore. No brand name school could risk this.
For example, someone with a Stanford MBA can get a high-paying job pretty easily. Employers value the Stanford MBA because it does much of the pre-screening for them (it's hard to get into the program, and presumably hard to get through.)If Stanford churned out 1 million MBAs a year, they would become useless.
I think this would dilute the brand beyond meaning.
The article doesn't propose a pure-virtual model, for exactly this reason. But imagine that for your favourite Harvard class, there is a corresponding regular meetup taking place in your hometown (and maybe other associated social events), and an online forum where the 20,000 people taking the class can discuss what's going on, seek help, and so on.
In my hometown there were only a handful of smart people my age.
In fact, it wasn't till I got to college that I understood what smart even was. Till then my sample had been so small that I couldn't distinguish smartness from the idiosyncrasies of the few individual smart people I knew.
It's true that what I propose is not an optimal solution for the very brightest students. For such people, if they wish to develop there really is no choice: they need to move to the centers of world learning, and seek out the brightest people they can, to challenge and teach them.
But for people who are merely bright and interested, and perhaps not able to afford Harvard's fees (or otherwise gain acceptance), what I propose might have some considerable value.
Maybe for art school. Wasn't the case for engineering. Real people may be nice to have, but I learned basically everything from the books/internet and reviewing homework/test solutions for what I got wrong.
...and I've learned more about programming from this web site than I have from anyone I met here at school. Granted, I'm going to Ohio State and not MIT, but our CS program actually ranks among the top public universities. Eventually, I plan on moving out to Silicon Valley to really get immersed in the programming entrepreneur mindset. This is not something that has been motivated by school or the people I've met here, but by the things I've read online. Clearly, an online idea as mentioned would have some good impact.
OSU's CS program is good enough, I suppose. I think it was good that the intro courses did not focus as much on learning any certain language (e.g. Java) as it did on learning to properly specify and program component-based software. While I'm not completely sold on their style of specification, the approach is undoubtedly better than "here's how to build a linked-list in Java" approach.
Now that I'm a grad student, I find that I'm a bit unsatisfied with Ohio State, however. There is a giant bureaucracy in the way of many things you want to do, something you might expect at a university of more than 50,000 students. One example is that the CIO of OSU recently implemented a minimum security policy for all computers on the network, one that allows only the use of certain operating systems, requires the use of antivirus/antimalware software (even on Linux systems), and requires that you allow them root access to ensure that these measures are in place. That's just one example.
In general, though, I find myself largely unhappy with grad school, but I think this may be true of many schools. It feels like much of the popular research is in corporate-programming areas, and there aren't many people interested in things like dynamic or functional languages, which I happen to be interested in.
Basically, I'm about ready to be done with grad school, but I don't think I'm representative of everyone. I'm just ready to have a higher reward/work ratio, and I'm ready to program productively, where the end result is something useful rather than a paper.
I agree that the most valuable learning happens when talking with smart knowledgeable people, but how many RTMs are really out there at universities? Most of the people I've learned from were people I met online, either on IRC or by exchanging emails. Of the people I consider impressive hackers, only two of them were introduced to me in meatspace: one at UC Davis, and one at a YC party (pc).
Now that is a valid reason: meeting other smart people who can inspire you and teach you things that the classes don't even begin to cover.
If only there were a way for prospective students to know how good their school is for this ahead of time. I'd pay double for a school that puts me around people like that.
Last week I was talking about the same topic with some friends, they didn´t like it very much.
My idea was to free the students from the need to go to class and the live classes. My idea was publish free all the material, like MIT´s OCW, and let the students study by themselves for free and setup a forum (in the broad sense of the word) to talk and try to resolve the problems. The students will be able to buy consult time with professors to work on the most difficult parts or when guidance is need.
Finally, the University would offer a couple of times each year the possibility to take the exam for each course.
This system is by no far new, a lot of language certificates out there (Cambridge, TOEFL...) work in a similar way.
IMO this will democratize the knowledge, but is quite difficult to build.
From the article: build an online audience in the millions, sets tuition to zero, starts broadcasting (and archiving) every lecture at the highest possible quality
This has been running in the UK since the 1970s ( http://www.open2.net/ ) and enrollment was free. 180000 students are currently enrolled.
"They can make the same revenue with 5 million regular viewers, each worth $40 to advertisers. Given Facebook’s admittedly somewhat ludicruous valuation ($300 / user), that seems a trifle."
That doesn't make any sense. Nobody thinks Facebook should be able to make $300/user. They're valued based on future growth potential.
Making $40 in ad revenue per user is pretty tough. If you assume $10 CPM, that's 4k impressions per, or 11 a day. Not impossible, but not trivial either, and totally unrelated to Facebook.
Fair enough, although it wasn't my intent to imply an apples to apples comparison. I admit that I don’t have a great sense of what reasonable numbers are here. Certainly, the type of site I propose ought to get far more attention from its users than your average internet site. Whether this translates into > $40 / year advertising revenue, I don't know.
David Friedman wrote about disaggregating and decentralizing the functions of educational institutions, and the positive effects thereof, in his seminal book "The Machinery of Freedom". I believe the relevant chapters are called "A radical critique of American universities" and "The impossibility of a university".
Of course, this was pre-internet.
Someone needs to tell Mr. Friedman about the open access movement so I can stop telling people about his works and start linking to them.
It's not even about revenue. Harvard doesn't set tuition to maximize revenue -- it's only a drop in the financial bucket.
As for offering content online, MIT has been pretty progressive in this regard, and they offer ocw.mit.edu. But having advertising would undermine the credibility of a university. I think it's better just to take the (small) hit, and make it ad-free.
It's not about profit? For virtually all schools, it is.
I think these discussions are highly distorted by just focusing on the top couple schools that are the exception to the norm and affect very few people anyway.
In Denmark university is free. You even get a state grant of about $1000 a month to live off while you study.
As we have no natural resources we have to fall back on a smart population. And since, according to numerous studies, we are one of the richest and happiest countries in the world it seems to work pretty well.
Wrong topic, should be "Why isn't University in the USA free".
In many other countries, university is free, or so cheap, that nearly the entire population can afford sending their childs to university, without going into debt.
I think it would actually be a fun experiment to get a bunch of people on this site together for a week or so in summer, maybe read through five or so books over the course of a week living together. I think that would potentially be a better model for education than just putting lectures online.