I think education is ripe for disruption. We will see rise of bootcamps and online education. Also university in foreign country costs peanuts.
The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.
I am kind of glad they spent that money to accommodate those students. Aren't you? That's not what is raising the cost of education.
EDIT: I did work on a mouse that provides haptic feedback including texture years ago, so I am aware that it is possible to provide braille like feedback over the web.
EDIT2: Many people have pointed out that MOOCs do add accessibility features. This is true, and good. I think the MOOCs are largely run by well meaning people.
In general, putting content online makes learning more accessible. As a specific example, Khan Academy has done important work developing tools in this area: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/tota11y.htm.
I see where you're coming from - many "dispuptive" services have (shamefully, in my opinion) resisted making their services accessible, but I don't think MOOCs really fall into that class.
Tell me; How many blind or deaf people did you know who took a cab before Uber? I went to RIT, which hosts a school for the deaf, and while there wasn't really a call for cabs at the school, I knew a couple people who did co-ops in big cities and were frustrated by how hard it was to get around. When asked why they didn't take a cab, they explained how much of a pain it was to communicate with their drivers, even with the fairly advanced assistive devices (every student had a sidekick, at the time a very advanced phone, and could usually pass around notes using such). It was still too hard; the barrier of entry on the communication was too high, and taxi drivers were easily frustrated trying to communicate fares and routes to deaf students. I can't even imagine a blind person hailing a cab. How would they know where to hail? How would they know when it stopped in front of them?
Now, I see posts on the RIT subreddit from time to time from deaf students who've just taken an Uber. It's not a problem anymore. There's a distinct group of blind users of the uber app; It works, the interface is consistent, and I just tried it myself (it wasn't easy, but I called a cab, and I think it'd work decently with practice).
[1] https://nfb.org/groundbreaking-settlement-end-discrimination...
I suppose that is the point though: the market decides, as opposed to an entity deciding that it is in the public good.
No, but they can (and do) add accessibility features.
Similarly, MOOCs with good captions plus these kinds of devices probably works at least as well as being in a classroom.
[1] http://store.humanware.com/hus/brailliant-bi-40-new-generati...
Blind (or otherwise disabled) people should have an assistant to help them around.
Some MOOCs are already brail reader friendly. And online education in general has very little barriers.
And online courses don't work well, being effective only on adults that already have an education.
You can talk about disruption all you want, but there's no substitute for an old fashioned college education. And in many European countries this education is subsidised by the state.
Even in the US college would be affordable if you would cut the evil from its source and that would be college loans.
Even in that case, I wouldn't put a coursera certificate on my resume. They are watered-down versions of good college courses and they're not really selective.
effective only on adults that
already have an education.
And don't get me wrong, that still has a lot of value and I've enjoyed my online courses greatly. But it simply can't be a replacement for a classic college education, which was what we were talking about.
Most people learn by direct interaction
What universities offer is deadlines and penalities for missed deadlines. Those are anti-procrastionation scaffolds that most people (including myself) need for effective long-term learning. MOOCs mostly lack this, and that why MOOCs have not yet replaced conventional schools and universities.
I've heard Harvard and Harvard Extension are basically opposites. It's nearly impossible to get into Harvard, but you'll almost certainly graduate and will probably have a decent GPA. It's nearly impossible not to get into Harvard Extension but a large number of people fail out pretty quickly and spectacularly (I have no associated with either institution).
No educational system will ever supplant higher education as we know it today, as we have known it for hundreds of years. The only discussion here is about the degree of tweaks. When you grow up in a family of university administrators and scientists and faculty, and then work for a university as professional staff, you realize how laughable most outsiders' naive perspectives are, from the idea that a proper university can be run like a business (ha), or that people will rationally select a college that gives them the best bang for their buck (haha), or that educational complements like boot camps and MOOCS will ever replace what higher education offers (hahahahaha).
While we're toiling away at our degrees, we often argue that it's just "a piece of paper." But that piece of paper matters. Unless you have a lot of paid work exprience, the inexperienced Ivy grad wins out to the mildly experienced community college grad almost every time. Yes, it's a shitty system but to change it you need to change global culture, maybe even human nature.
As far as boot camps go, they're a good idea but even if you pass one with flying colors and could make an iOS app with one hand and a Rails server with another, the perception is still that you're somehow less qualified than a college graduate. Again, it sucks, but a hiring manager is going to ask themselves whether they could get blamed more for hiring a college grad that turns out to suck at their job, or a boot camp graduate that turns out to suck at their job.
Honestly, if you really want to "disrupt" education, you're barking up the wrong tree. The best education is a good job. The best people to teach you how to do your job are the ones doing it with you. I firmly believe that the best way to provide good jobs and valuable skills is to heavily promote - and perhaps even subsidize - paid apprenticeships.
Nothing says "I am worth paying $X for this job" like a resume that says "I was paid $X for this job."
In that sense foreign universities are already disrupting US education with much lower overhead.
Take a 4 year bootcamp which operates in semesters, and you got something very similar to university.
I don't know why you'd need any more than 1 semester at a boot camp to learn the basics or enough to work with a new programming language or framework.
Again, it's not about the education, it's about the willingness for someone to hire you and pay you money. So even if a boot camp that costs 1/10th of a college is subsidized so that tons of people join it, most employers will still see boot camp graduates as inferior to university graduates, because reasons, and because they want to avoid making the wrong hiring decision as much as they want to make the right one.
But this is not true. Employers are already not willing to pay university graduates 4x salary as they did a few decades ago. Correlation between university degree and skills is decreasing.
This already happened in post-communist countries, Germany etc.. 70% of people have university degree. Everyone is overqualified for 90% jobs, and you get PhDs who work as cashiers. In that environment nobody asks for education because it is waste of time (low correlation between degree and skills).
It wound up being an exploitative nightmare, and it eventually got shut down for it.