http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd
Then there's github. Portfolios > resumes and everyone knows it.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out where we're headed.
Further, I rarely give straight answers to my student's questions. Their question is usually a symptom of a deeper misunderstanding, and figuring out what that is, and leading them to understand that, is my real job. Someone who just says "The answer is X" does not serve the same role as a teacher.
If you're not willing to take the initiative on your own to do what you need to do to learn the material for a class you're taking, then you shouldn't be complaining if you haven't learned the material when the course is over.
When you're taking a course, it is literally someone's job to answer your questions.
When you're teaching a class of 50+ students, your primary job is to lecture them. Two-way interaction is usually reserved for office hours.
If you're not enrolled in a course, you would need a patient friend who is an expert in the subject, an extremely patient acquaintance who is an expert, or an expert tutor. All of those are hard to come by.
Only because learning by watching online lectures currently is not a common method of learning (because the technology necessary for it to be possible has only recently become available). If it were to become more common, these resources would certainly be more readily available. The tutors would also be held to more exacting standards, since there would be competition. At a traditional university, for a given semester for a given course, you're usually forced to select from 1 or 2 professors, whom you can only indirectly evaluate for their performance after the course has ended. But with tutors, you would be free to pick whoever you wanted.
Also, most of these professors' primary job is their research, not teaching. The tutors would be focused on teaching, and would thus do a better job of it. Being a good researcher in a field means almost nothing when it comes to teaching undergraduate level material. Some of the professors I've had have been some of the smartest people I've ever met, but their communication & teaching skills have been nothing short of appalling.
Further, I rarely give straight answers to my student's questions. Their question is usually a symptom of a deeper misunderstanding, and figuring out what that is, and leading them to understand that, is my real job. Someone who just says "The answer is X" does not serve the same role as a teacher.
Competition that would result from the ability to cherry-pick personal tutors for each course would naturally eliminate those who did a poor job of teaching their students, so that wouldn't be an issue either.
It seems like this will be the first thing to go. Without participation, there's no advantage to attending the lecture over watching the recording. Professors already expect you to come to class having read the textbook; perhaps soon they'll expect you to come to class having watched the lecture online.
2. The courses with the highest attrition rates are always the 100-level weed-out classes taught in 500-person lecture halls. At my school, a 40% drop rate in Intro CS was normal and 60% wasn't unheard-of. Were the drop-outs all too dumb to learn programming? Did some of them have trouble getting their questions answered? Nobody lost as much sleep over those questions as they did over their thesis defense. See #1.
3. Most student questions are about BS that's irrelevant to learning. What's on the test? Do we have to read all of chapter 7? Why did you take ten points off on problem four? What font and spacing do you want me to use on the write-up?
I agree that formal education can change a student's world when it's done right. I don't think our current system rises to meet that standard very often. In part that's because it's easy to ignore real problems by thinking about the ideal. University education can be better than it is now, and competition from less formal learning can help it get there.
I should have just said we have empirical evidence that teachers themselves aren't that necessary. At the bottleneck where most failures happen -- lecture hall weed-out classes -- students have essentially the same non-relationship with profs that they have with lecturers on YouTube.
But even supposing universities are 30% better, internet learning is a classic disruptive technology. Old players in the market are too big to innovate. The new technology looks like a toy. It's lightweight and flexible. It's $200k cheaper. New players will emerge to capture some of that savings in exchange for removing some of the inefficiencies. Eventually they reach feature parity with the old guard, but with a lower price point, etc. etc.
The worst case is Worse Is Better. I'm bullish.
Mostly, yes. Intro courses just aren't that hard. Anyone who has even a prayer of surviving in the real world should be able to get through them even if their questions go unanswered and the TA doesn't like them.
The lack of a clear relationship between effort and reward is the ultimate cause of the haplessness they exhibit. Take away the structure and they might just start taking responsibility for themselves.
Having tutored some of them - who all changed majors after the "flunk out" courses - the answer is a qualified Yes. I wouldn't call them stupid, but I would say that they just couldn't "get it". Just like some programmers cannot "get" pointers, many people just don't have what it takes to program.
Many people wanted to be a developer because it pays well. When they got into the introductory classes, they found that they didn't "get" it - and for the folks who dropped the class and changed majors - they could not get it. I'm not saying that programming is some magical career where rainbows flow out of unicorn's rear ends.
You haven't examined the possibility that you couldn't teach it.
I don't want to question your intelligence here. I'm sincerely interested in your answer to the question: how do you know it's the one and not the other?
Here's some historical perspective. Before he became "The Great," Alexander's father Philip arranged for the young man to be tutored by Aristotle, who was already a world-famous academic. Philip was famous as well, for having his political enemies flayed or boiled alive. Imagine Aristotle saying to Philip, "Your son Alexander is a very bright young man. If he would only apply himself. B-"
In particular, my experience is that lectures are more about information transfer and less about problem solving and application.
Today, that is lost, with or without the loss of university proper. With US incomes skewed more than ever before, I'm not sure if we've lost the class part.
The problem isn't the availability of knowledge. Books have been around for a very long time. What is the additional mechanism which will allow the youtube revolution to dethrone the school/university system?
Some benefits of a university course over a library of videos: - A structured pathway through the knowledge in the field - A body of peers/teachers who can help answer your questions - A carrot/stick/framework for those people who don't have the self discipline to engage in a three year course of study on their own - Critiques on your ongoing state of knowledge, ie, a way of solving the problem of a student who doesn't know something but can't fix it because they don't know that they don't know it.
Nonetheless, there will be people attending universities for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine) as the a university education providers a better option for those who are unsure (Physics or Chemistry? Computer Science or Electrical Engineering?) and are looking for a more structured approach.
Disclaimer: I have a Bachelors Degree and a Masters degree myself, but would interview a self-taught hacker (with a github or bitbucket account) in a heartbea. Once at an interview, they're on the same footing as somebody from a University, provided they studied algorithms, data structures, recursion and all the interview question fodder.