Can schools survive in the age of the web?

<p><pre><code> As Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a September article for the MIT Technology Review: “If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?” </code></pre> Maybe popular TV shows like Jersey Shore should contain public service announcements like "Snooki says: reading is fun!"<p>Or maybe we need more on-screen text in games like Call of Duty &#38; Halo. For example, you can't complete a particular objective unless you figure out that a paragraph of text tells you to look up a "code word" from page 6 of a real book like The Lorax.<p>Schools and teachers aren't our problem. If parents and kids aren't intrinsically motivated to learn, how can you force them to?<p>I hope that more American parents will convince their kids to take education seriously, or else many other countries (with access to American online courses) will eventually surpass us.

MOOCs might replace a traditional university for a few people, but the top universities will remain around. The major benefit to college is not the academics, but the social connections you make. For hackers, this might be meeting a fellow hacker to start a company with. For a director, it might mean meeting an actress to star in a movie. For a businessperson it might mean getting a job at a friend's dad's company.<p>The central idea behind MOOCs is that education is expensive now. It isn't -- just go to the library and pick up a book. Completely free, and if you're disciplined enough, probably pretty close to a university quality education. I'll concede that this doesn't apply to hard science education where you need sophisticated labs, but it does apply to a lot of students' fields of study.<p>When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. You need a nice gym, a welcoming student center, and a nice dorm area for people to socialize. If you were to build a campus solely around education, it would probably be pretty cheap. Just buy up some cheap office space in a nondescript office buildings, and have professors give lectures there. But this isn't what students want.

I've taken a few courses through coursera, udacity, racked up points in khan and I've watched some videos from the MIT open source libraries, so the answer to "But what will that mean for traditional institutions?" is they will (hopefully) change dramatically.<p>Imagine having 5,000 students all wanting a MSCS, each student writes out a check for only $20,000 ($5,000 year). So you have $100 million dollars at your disposal for the complete education... what sort of 'online system' could you create for $100 million? Not just video, not just lectures, hell you could make games, interactive puzzles, you could pay to tape some of the brightest minds in the field... and you could change it --every year--.<p>You could offer a better experience for a fraction of the price that students pay today.<p>edit: fixed confusion over 20k

The web is possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century and has certainly democratized the way the human race shares knowledge but I don't think online education can ever become a better or more competitive option than traditional offline education. There are unique cases where each is better than the other but I cannot see one overtaking the other. At best I think online education could become almost equal to traditional education but never a more popular or better option.<p>Consider those living in countries where web access is still rare or slow or a challenge to access. Online education isn't viable for these people though it may be in the future.<p>There is no substitute for being educated in the presence of a professor and a room full of students. You could email, IM, video conference, or voice call all day long but web based education takes a bit of the humanity out of the whole experience and it's importance should not be underestimated. Online education makes things more rigid in some ways. An instructor prepares lessons as usual, teaches, then receives feedback from students in the form of questions and their scores on assignments and tests just like usual but theres an advantage to being present in a room full of students. That advantage is that it is far easier to tell if students are catching on and if one or more students are struggling to understand certain concepts then it's easier to sort of improvise and immediately find out and address the cause of any sort of problem.<p>Individual attention suffers with online learning. You can still give individual attention but for many, having someone there makes all the difference.<p>That said, there are just as many benefits to online learning and I have to say, I don't believe one is better than the other, just that they're different and that I don't think either will become endangered any time soon.<p>As someone who went to but did not finish a prestigious university, I think online education should only be sought out in certain circumstances. The experiences you have when attending a traditional university are priceless and cannot be had online. Those experiences aren't part of any curriculum but are an important part of forming the person you will become after graduation. Online education seems, at least to me, better for those needing a cheaper alternative to traditional education. Also those who are unable to physically attend a university due to, again, cost constraints, or their location would also seem to be a good fit as well as those folks who are older, need a more flexible schedule, have difficulty learning in a classroom, and others.<p>I've dome online and traditional education. They compliment each other well and both offer certain things the other doesn't but given the hypothetical choice of choosing all of one and none of the other, I'd take the traditional experience any day.<p>The web is the most incredible thing that's happened to us since the Enlightenment probably but it isn't the cure to all mankind's ills. Online education is certainly a viable alternative to a traditional education but I still don't see it being able to rival or outmatch a traditional education. There are intangibles that come with a traditional education that have no on,one counterpart. So I doubt traditional schools have anything to fear and truly hope they don't.

I can't read this article in the UK. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png</a><p>Apparently we're allowed to benefit from the profits they make with the BBC Worldwide service but we're not allowed to actually see the content.

One thing the article doesn't touch on is how to replace things other than the big, sit-in-an-auditorium style introductory lectures. It's plausible MOOCs are on their way to delivering the equivalent of that educational experience for much less money. But that's really only the introductory part of university curriculum. Just as important imo is the part where you do projects and get hands-on experience.<p>For example, in my senior-level AI class, we had lectures for the first 2/3 of the semester (approximately), and then for the last third, picked a project to do individually or in small teams, and met one-and-one with the professor once a week to develop and carry out our project. That was <i>by far</i> the most educational part of that class. And in physics, the physics lab was just as important as the lecture, possibly even more important when it came to learning how to actually carry out experiments properly.<p>I can imagine that kind of learning being tackled, too, but I think it'll require something considerably more innovative.

<i>As the author and technology theorist Ian Bogost argued earlier this year, "if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?"</i><p>A good analogy would be newspapers vs news websites. In the end, it is still the same news, but online it is more up-to-date, globally accessible, and more convenient to access. Lectures suck when they're at 8am and if you miss them they're gone forever. They also can't be paused or fast-forwarded. But most importantly, they only happen in one location. Putting them online puts them in the hands of students across the globe, and gives them the ability to watch them at any time, at their own pace.

I think I would have done better at school if there had been a camera at the back of the class and ability to download the videos later.<p>Firstly, people tend to talk a lot in class. This is distracting and makes it difficult to hear what is being said. Perhaps if there was a recoding nobody would want their rude behaviour documented.<p>When listening to a class it is also very easy for your concentration to wander for long enough that you have trouble keeping up with the rest of the lecture because you missed something. A video trivially allows your to rewind those minutes.

That's the same as the question "can schools survive in the age of the book". Education is not technology/media.

The most important asset for a private school is connections.<p>I've experienced schools that were directly tied to the industry, so that the local companies would first go there and check with the teachers to see what student would be suitable for their company, instead of advertising the position through the usual channels.<p>The student would go from graduation right into employment without having to do any actual job search.<p>If you are an institution that has an established connection to the local industry, then I think such a school would be able to survive the online offerings from other international schools/sites.

I always wonder about headlines like this, schools exist to educate students, if they provide value to the students they will exist. Its the nature of the market. If they don't provide value they will cease to exist (unless maintained by an unholy subsidiary of tax payer money)

<i>Finally</i>, mainstream media addresses the elephant in the room re:education.

Yes, schools will survive in the age of the web. Most people learn via interaction, not passive observation. That's the reason we have homework, and labs, and (at the K12 level) all sorts of silly in-class activities.<p>College education will not change much either. If the purpose of college was simply exposure to factual information, they would never have survived the commercialization of the textbook. Colleges are about higher-level, deeper interaction with the material. (This means different things for different majors.) Moreover, colleges provide a simple, relatively efficient way of proving familiarity or mastery of a subject matter that would be technologically impossible for a web-course to provide (i.e., prevention of most forms of cheating).<p>The web may affect the <i>number</i> of colleges, but it will not affect the fundamental nature of higher education.

What I suspect in the future is a team of really qualified teachers offer short videos online, like those on KhanAchamdey and use them as supplement. But I don't see traditional school disappearing because of jobs and keeping a child at home is very dangerous. Hybrid class runs by having one recitation/dicussion and the rest online. On the recitation day the students have to take a quiz to show they watched the videos. What it killed is daily interaction with others.<p>You can try to do that in college, but not below college. Kids would enjoy to go to school just to see their friends.<p>Another thing is considered is once again jobs. What are you going to do with millions of teachers? If each school makes a video, only 1/1000000 videos will be favored.<p>Online classes have many bad things, and personally I only use it to supplement my college courses.