Forget University — Use the Web For Education, Says Gates

An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates attended the Techonomy conference earlier this week, and had quite a bold statement to make about the future of education. He believes the Web is where people will be learning within a few years, not colleges and university. During his chat, he said, 'Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.'" Of course, the efficacy of online learning is still in question; some studies have shown a measurable benefit to being physically present in a classroom. Still, online education can clearly reach a much wider range of students. Reader nbauman sent in a related story about MIT's OpenCourseWare, which is finding success in unexpected ways: "50% of visitors self-identified as independent learners unaffiliated with a university." The article also mentions a situation in which a pair of Haitian natives used OCW to get the electrical engineering knowledge they needed to build solar-powered lights that have been deployed in many remote towns and villages.

rewind ftw

[nten]

I always zoned out in lectures while in school. I probably have ADD or something. I never fell asleep, but every so often I'd either keep thinking about the last thing the proff said, and get behind, or just realize I had gone into standby for about 30-45s and had no hope of catching up. I also find it impossible to take notes and listen at the same time. Listening to Gibert Strange's linear algebra lectures on OCW was infinitely more educational than my original course in college. Partly because he is simply a far superior teacher to the one I had in college, but mostly because I could rewind and listen to what he said again. If I have a question I cannot ask the proff, but I can search it and find a hundred people answering my exact question.

In short, I totally agree that the internet is a better teacher for self motivated students, but this will create an accreditation problem. The right way to fix it is for interviews to get more complex and difficult, but that should really be looked at anyway. Employers are terrible at ascertaining the actual skill level of candidates. So in many first world countries they get stuck with useless mouths to feed because they cannot get rid of them for simply being vastly subpar. Or perhaps I am the only person who works in an office where "programmers" have been made software process facilitators, data entry personnel, or even facilities coordinators (fancy name for the guy who orders pencils), just to get them away from the code. Some of them have management skills and get promoted away from the code, but they tend to harbor a resentment for not being able to contribute earlier in their career, and displace it on the engineers they now manage.

Re:how about getting rid of need BS or MS for leve

[thetoadwarrior]

If you haven't learned how to speak by the end of high school then you're not going to learn how to.

Re:As a self-taught programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a self-taught programmer, the only disadvantage I have noted is that while I just know "a way that will work great", schooled people will be able to put some name to how they want to do things. The X Model, or Y Pattern.

I'm a self-taught techie as well with an associate's in IT.

Best thing I ever did when I got into the software engineering field was take the equivalent of a minor in real computer science at night later in life, including a survey of discrete math, stats, and linear. You may not end up with a BS, but you'll find that the knowledge and reasoning ability gained is worth the time invested. I used to code 6502 and 68k assembler, then I took a formal architecture class. I didn't know what I was missing.

Re:Nobody needs more than 512k

[Mspangler]

"But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person"

Not to mention the chemistry lab, the distillation column in the Chem. E building, the fire assay furnaces in the mining building, the lasers in physics, and the entire barn full of animals in agriculture.

It's not all book-learning and the domain of pure thought the Liberal Arts majors think that college should be.

Re:"Good Will Hunting" scenario

[painandgreed]

There's so little taught in a university course that I couldn't read off a public library.

Actually, I doubt that. Most public libraries simply aren't interested the technical books and journals needed to provide a university level education and research. They're more interested in what the public wants and reads and have limited budgets to provide it. After leaving the university system for the real world, I kept up with some of my research and tried using the local public library. The references were there to tell me what I needed, but they had none of the required reading. From there I had to go to the local university library and search for things, and even then I had to leave the main library and use the departmental libraries that were scatted across campus to find books and magazines I needed. Sure, you can get about anything you want via interlibrary loan, but guess where those technical books and journals are coming from, most likely a university library which is being paid for by the university.

Re:Nobody needs more than 512k

[Wyatt Earp]

Businesses are about leveraging the workers so that more money ends up in the CEO, board and shareholder's pockets.

Education is about learning.

Re:Academia = filter

[DogDude]

Leave me alone. I'm 'baitin!

Re:Academia = filter

[TheRaven64]

For a good example of this, I'd refer you to von Daniken [wikimedia.org]. He makes a great deal in the preface to his books about being an autodidact and how it allows him to approach things from a novel perspective. Then he writes a load of logical fallacies and ignores masses of contradictory evidence and presents an argument that boils down to 'I'm not clever enough to think of an explanation for this, therefore it is magic'.