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"But I'm afraid it won't happen for awhile"

There is a well-known tendency to overestimate change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.

Even as I was predicting that this could have huge effects in posts yesterday, I say this fully aware that it won't happen next year, or the year after, or the year after. And even then, the inflection point I would look for is not "when nearly everybody goes online for college" but "when nearly every employer will accept online degrees as sufficient for employment verification", which is almost certain to happen many many years before a shift.

On that note, I completely disagree with your claim that all four groups need to move in sync. Only one group needs to move: employers. Once that happens, all the incentives will be put in place for the rest to follow in turn.

And, ultimately, that's my argument. Undercut the current universities by a full order of magnitude or more on price, and you completely realign the incentive structure. It will take time for society to adjust to the incentive structure, but it will be as inevitable as the move to cities when it happens. (And moaning about it about as productive as moaning about the loss of "small town values" as humanity keeps moving into cities.)

It won't happen in this recession, but it very well could happen in the next one. And if this one drags on for long enough... this recession has certainly had the effect of precipitating a lot of things that we've all known were coming for a while but expected to happen in the "indefinite future", with the definite future happening somewhat unexpectedly definitely in a nearer term than we thought. (Newspaper industry crashing, numerous industries facing rather more immediate results of bad decisions on pensions, the automotive and local governments most visibly, etc. All things that many people could see coming, but expected to be able to put off longer.) If this recession drags on for long enough the higher ed bubble could pop far sooner than anybody today would be willing to predict. Including me. I'm not predicting it, merely leaving the possibility open.

(I do think the next ten years are likely to end up more socially chaotic than the past ten or twenty would lead us to predict, and I don't mean 1960s-style social chaos, but chaos as fundamental institutions are broadly rewritten. A higher education bubble pop would be merely one part of that.)

True - what we need is 500 years of experience of university knowledge available for free on some sort of free, static display, random access information retrieval system. Where anyone can sit down and just read the data directly.

Not sure what to call the volumes but you could store them in a modified tape library - without the tapes

What would change things is if online learning offered a more certain verification of skill and ability than is offered by the conventional university.

That would change things for employers immediately.

But that kind-of assurance would be hard to give within the context of online course with form-based tests, however challenging the tests are. Someone who can absolutely anything online might still not have the social skills necessary for many jobs. We hope that someone who's done four years at a good school has absorbed some social skills. If there was online way to actually guarantee that a person has abilities that an employer wants, then online could win.

The other side of this is how quickly business in general becomes nothing but online interaction. The sooner that arrives, the sooner ability to interact well online will become the main qualification and thus the sooner an online degree will have prevalence.

I'm sure there was a day when people said similar things about other industries ... "blogs and craigslist won't hurt the newspaper industry for a long time ..."

Regarding your points:

1. MIT is MIT–most college students don't go there. Heck, most don't even try to get in. If you combine the online resources of all institutions, things like iTunesU, and other resources (Wikipedia), there is enough content to create alternative learning programs for most people.

Yes, I've used Blackboard. Yes, it's terrible. That is a software nice ripe for innovation–unfortuantely BB has some ridiculous web 1 patents. Hopefully those will get overturned soon.

2. The concept of a 4 year degree might simply be outdated. Personally, I envision more compressed, career-focused programs. I understand the need to be well-rounded and have a baseline competency in English and math, but I think you can easily shave 18+ months off a 4 year degree program without the final product changing.

3. He also got a 1600 on his SAT IIRC. And again, MIT is somewhat of an outlier in this regard. If you're going to severly shake up the edu space, MIT isn't where you aim IMO.

4.1 Lower costs and a faster track to their child having a job and moving out 4.2 Productivity/economic gains. Eventually, a smaller edu budget (just guessing here) 4.3 That's the tough one as they stand to lose the most ... but that's what disruptive technologies do ... they will have to adapt 4.4 Any Edu 2.0 should still have some sort of co-op/internship component, so hopefully these graduates will still come out with work experience ... perhaps even more than graduates now ... I think degree requirements are already becoming softer, anyway

5. I agree schools can serve as a childhood->adulthood bridge. But, more on a social level than an intelligence level. If raw intelligence is just that (raw), what does being on a campus change? Furthermore, doesn't completing a degree on one's own show more determination than going through the motions/schedule of a 4-year program?

I had a small edu startup before my current company. I'd love to be back there soon and be part of this change.

In Scandinavia it's not uncommon to do one semester a year, working the rest of the time, graduating in 10 years.

I agree with many of your points, but...

1. The technology just isn't there yet. MIT's entire lecture series is not online, far from it. Many of the OCW courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It's horrible.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the technology, which is just fine thank you. What's missing is a few man-years of recording and post-production work - which colleges probably don't want to spend money on in order to give away free. A 2-hour lecture isn't too complex to film, but to get good results you need to spend maybe $2000+.

Multiply that out by the number of courses and you're looking at quite a chunk of money...although it would seem a highly appropriate task for a government grant (if you wanted to put the material into the public domain) or could be self-financing with a little planning.

Th BBC's open university offers a model for this, though a rather pricey one - http://www.open2.net/ ...inexplicably, though, it's still built around TV broadcasts which is kinda stupid nowadays.

Yeah, I made this point really clumsily. What I meant is that the technology for full distance learning being equally effective isn't there yet. Video is probably as close as you can get, but even in that case, MIT's OCW video offerings are sorely lacking.

A startup opportunity? Video cameras are incredibly cheap, a PC with eight webcams, software to do initial editing of a lecture with final edit done by a human?

I can imagine a lectures could be put on video for much less than $2000 each with the right technology.

Is this human working for free?

Webcams are really horrible though. If you're working with an eye to posterity you'd be better off using a few regular cameras, and people to operate them. Editing is a mixed bag. You could show the blackboard, but depending on what's up there you might be better off doing titling in software and having it float beside the lecturer.

Certainly you can do it for much less...$2000 was a ballpark price for doing something of pretty decent quality that's going to be visually engaging - the best lecturer in the world is a lot less compelling when s/he's been reduced to the size of a postcard or less. I think auto-editing would be next to useless except for the most basic things like:

  while(wide_cam.frame.rightside.movement = true)
    wait 10 seconds
    edit_cut_to (medium_closeup.cam[1])
  end while

It'd be a lot simpler to just hire a bunch of people and pay them to do the work - trying to automate what is essentially an aesthetic process is a recipe for wasting money. Bear in mind that you do get some economies of scale as you do more 'episodes'.

On the other hand, I do think there's a great startup opportunity here, mixing some basic production techniques with some visual FX techniques (let's animate that polynomial as the lecturer explains it to us) and some decent interactive controls (pause and rewind are sloppy relics of linear information access - what we want are the kind of contextual controls at which game UIs excel).

Mturk might be cool. "Here are 3 30 second video clips. At any given time, hover over the one with the clearest view of the subject matter. Here's 5 cents.

it's still built around TV broadcasts which is kinda stupid nowadays

Not really, for a number of reasons. One of which is that the OU's target audience includes people who might not be able to afford a multimedia PC. Another of which is that a broadcast creates a shared experience in time - the class can all be kept "on the same page". Dealing with a class who're all over the course would make it much more expensive.

Yes really, also for a number of reasons...but I have to eat my words here.

I haven't lived in the UK for a while, so when I searched to find out what was up with the OU, I went to http://www.open2.net/ which is specifically for OU-on-TV resources. I should have one to http://www.open.ac.uk/ which is the real OU site, and where there are multiple study paths and resources, of which the TV broadcast lectures are only one option among many.

Sorry :-/

What I should have said

Non-UK HN readers should check out the Open University - this is the best landing page: http://www3.open.ac.uk/study You can get an accredited degree or pursue post-graduate studies, and while an OU degree is not as desirable as one from a top-end institution, it is still respected - not least because of the student dedication required. The OU does have absolutely outstanding course materials.

Student fees vary, though they're still a bit pricey - roughly $15,000 for an undergraduate degree if you live outside the UK, about half that if in. You need to be in Europe in order to take exams at least once a year.

The change won't start with students who are well served by the current served but those who aren't. Your are focused on why college may continue to work well for students 18-22 in America. But adults seeking a second career (or third or fourth) may find distance learning an attractive option. As well as those already working looking to upgrade their skills.

If you don't have the tenacity to self-teach, maybe you shouldn't go to college. Tenacity is a much better selector than whatever we have going on in higher education now.

1 is a real issue right now. But, this will change. Once there are enough users, students/philantropists/governments might pool up money to pay good universites/professors to put up videos & other material for free online. There is scope for a website which would keep track of requests & payments for a particular course.