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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

I’ve sat through so many lectures where it’s just one dude talking, with a sprinkle of a question here and there.

Higher education just has this weird power, they are held in such reverence that they are actually able to say ‘no, this magical monologue can only be heard in person’.

Make it mostly remote, bring the kids in for proctored exams, enable insane flexibility with respect to people’s time. Enable all types of schedules and accommodations, which believe it or not is also a barrier, not just money.

My college simply did not offer any of it’s science classes after work hours, definitely no chance to catch one on a weekend. We had to be there for the magical in person monologue.

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To be fair, lectures are cheap (and entirely worthless) but labs and recitations are somewhat expensive and tailored (to varying degrees) to each student.

Not saying college shouldn't die - it's a racket. However, I can't imagine performing any of my magnetism or optics labs remotely.

Yeah, definitely can’t substitute lab work, or proctoring exams since that’s one of the better ways to curb cheating (which would only get worse online).

There’s a way to do this, but it starts with first destroying some of our gods - the almighty lecture.

How about all lectures go online and you come in for a couple of days a week for labs? Lets cut the price in half and stop the insanity.

There was a time a kid could get a summer job and put himself through medical or law school.

This is basically how the Open University currently works. They send you the materials for the module, you submit a bunch of assignments that are marked by tutors throughout the year, then sit an externally invigilated and marked exam at the end.

It seems to work well apart from people losing motivation, but there could be unexploited network effects in large numbers of people supporting each other more informally if it became the norm.

There is a lot of dropout in the introductory classes (I remember one person didn't make it to the end of the first tutorial). Once you get past that it becomes more stable.

There were forums where you could get peer support and I think some people even got together for regular in-person sessions.

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