Harvard + MIT = edX

Its nearly a year since Panos put up his blog post on cheating, which was discussed on HN: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254</a><p>With online courses which confer degrees/certification to students from all over the world, there is far too much of a vested interest in optimizing to the shortest path required to get the degree. Its no longer a subject pool of auto didacts, but a subject pool where auto didacts are the minority and degree/certifacte focused individuals are in the majority.<p>Many students aren't like that - but if they come from a background which doesn't give a damn whether you learned something as long as you got a degree/cert from X uni.<p>If in the end, if the shortest path is just doing the test, turning in the Homework, and ticking attendance, then someone will be doing it for a price. They already are doing it in colleges.<p>The scale of it in turn makes peer review, or group work, complex projects which require active scrutiny, hard, if not impossible to execute.<p>I don't see how this can't end with course material being put out by one group, and standardized testing being done by someone else, a la the CFA or other certification exams.

Whenever anyone defends the current brick and morder model of college education they do a lot of handwaving about the benefits of small classrooms, access to professors, and the "college experience". In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota, one of the biggest colleges in the world both in terms of enrollment and campus size, most of the professors didn't seem passionate about teaching. They were talking "at" these massive auditoriums filled with half-interested kids. I always resented having to physically go to class, especially since I had a long commute to school every day. Rushing back and forth across this massive campus from class to class seemed ridiculous to me as well. I get that some kids need that personal attention from professors and TAs to learn, but I certainly didn't. I learn best on my own, at my own pace, and in the comfort of my own home.

I'm still unclear what the business model for universities (as opposed to private companies) in this space is. The problem is, they will inevitably be compared to (and in some sense compete against) their non-virtual counterparts. Especially when they've essentially given away all their course materials and lecture videos for free, and considering these classes are not for credit, I just don't see the benefit for the average person over studying what's already freely available. And one can't even make the argument that the free resources aren't meant to be used to learn a subject (as is the case with most free reference material), since these were obviously created with precisely that goal in mind.<p>When they inevitably move to a tuition based model, the ever present question of "the real MIT or the online one?" may be too much to overcome.