to: studyhall-discuss@lists.cs.princeton.edu

saved link:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/StudyHall_Discuss/upload/090912-035551.yahoou/

original link:

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/diploma-mill/2009/09/08/welcome-yahoo-u

Quote:

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which \“going to college\” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors.
Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.

It is hard to predict the precise pace of change—but it’s possible that within 15 years most college credits will come from classes taken online.

Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student. The Ivies will be much less affected than the mid-tier and local schools. But colleges that depend on tuition, and have no special brand, will be hit hard. The recession will accelerate this trend, as students become warier of taking on loans, and state schools experiment after fund cuts. This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy, and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

The amount of structured information is already astounding, and in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54)-year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online History of the Chinese Revolution classes, complete with video lectures, syllabi, take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other \“students,\” and links to free academic literature.

Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, I would venture that college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators (Google News, Yahoo News, blogs) have taken over from the physical—and virtual—newspaper [16] as the entry point for news consumption. 

you’ll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities, mixing and matching parts of a degree and helping to navigate the different institutional requirements.

Soon, aggregators will combine and repackage not just courses, but the modules inside courses. Hourlong sessions will be remixed for different classes: That one hour on the French Revolution is good for both French History and for the History of Revolutions class.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors.

When this happens—be it in 10 years or 20—we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now [10]. 

So how should we think about this? On the one hand, students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable last century. Poorer students will soon be able to get a college degree. These are extraordinary developments. But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research, and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk. If the mainstream of \“college teaching\” becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts whose wares are sold by barkers in the subway, we’ll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.





Randy