I really respect Stanford's willingness to share content for free. They seem to have let go of the elitist notion of the past wherein content is worth so much to universities. This feels like they actually want people to learn.
As an academic, it makes me wondering how education will change over the next 10 years. If a prof gives a fantastic lecture in the Fall of 2010, does he need to repeat himself in 2011? I had the experience of lecturing an undergrad course in Programming Languages many years ago. Honestly, the content didn't change much (I was teaching Scheme, ML and Prolog). I did get a bit better answering and anticipating student questions. I'll admit that in some cases, content must be updated fairly frequently. For instance, Prof. Ousterhaut's web app course on the site seems to be covering Rails 2.x.x. Teaching it today, perhaps 3.x or 3.1 would be used.
However, when I look at how well the community can improve the quality of a lecture, it blows my mind. In the Stanford AI class, for instance, the lecturer made a slight error where he defined the admissibility criteria of the h function (estimated cost) in A* search as less than the true cost rather than less than or equal to the true cost. Well ... this was quickly spotted by students and a correction was promptly issued. This blows my mind!
This also has the potential of making things worse on the supply side of education. In the last decade, it has undoubtedly gotten harder to get a faculty position in Computer Science. Will the advent of online education make that situation worse? As someone who has been an educator in the past, my personal opinion is that education should be available for free. But, I worry that it might not be sustainable.
The rise of Wikipedia with the concomitant decline of commercial, paper encyclopedias offers some insight into the future of education. In the future, there will be more education available and it will be very cheap.
What will not be sustainable anymore is a career in education where one gives essentially the same lecture for 30 years but gets paid as if he has created an entirely new lecture every year.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the development of subjects like mathematics. Without the income from teaching students how will the capitalist system maintain academics in research? Who will pay if education effectively becomes free?
Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic that a brilliant lecturer can now lecture to as many people who choose to watch the video - that's not quite educating them but almost. I see that an institution then can train millions of people using a single good lecturer and a system of auxiliaries, admin staff and what-have-you. But then what of those who were doing [not directly/immediately commercial] research supported by their lecture positions.
EDIT to add: the problem with human tutors is that they are inconvenient. It takes time to schedule a tutor, and you can only get help at certain times (that is, during the tutoring session). Human tutors have many advantages, but a program that is merely passable will nevertheless be immensely popular simply because it is convenient.
One ordinarily learns the maths appropriate to ones course in that department which runs the course.
Do you mean your libraries have classrooms for private tuition? I'm not familiar with this sort of thing. In my country private tuition happens at the tutor or students house.
If a musician gets a royalty every time his song is played on the radio, why can't a professor get a royalty every time his video is watched?
"Will the advent of online education make that situation worse?"
+1 to what everyone else is saying in this thread about the Stanford classes, I'm loving the ML one so far.
1) Tenured Professors - traditional tenure track. 2) Untenured Instructors - traditional instructors. 3) Research Professors - essentially freelance entrepreneurs in the research space under the CMU umbrella. They seek their own funding, hire students, advise, but don't teach.
As such, I doubt this will lead to any major shifts in the employment situation of academics.
The real innovation in the AI, ML and DB classes is making automated grading of creative work available to everyone for free. It's a very altruistic thing to do, but other than the effort needed to build and maintain the systems, I don't see the downsides for the school. Fancy schools are for letting other people know you're smart enough to get into a fancy school, meeting other smart people, and having access to people who are doing cutting-edge research. The content isn't the distinguishing factor.
You still have more people that want come to you and pay your fees than you can accept - but in the future they might not have a cheaper tier university as an alternative.
It's like Oxford publishing the OED. Even if you didn't make money from the book - whats it worth to your selling other courses overseas?