Forget University — Use the Web For Education, Says Gates 393
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.
Re:how about getting rid of need BS or MS for leve (Score:1, Interesting)
Judging from your post, I'd say the opposite.
You (personally) need to get a BS so you can learn how to write properly and communicate effectively.
He Did Graduate & He Advises Otherwise (Score:3, Interesting)
Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, so seeing him say that university isn't necessary is a little unsurprising.
And yet four months ago, he advised students not to do that [indiatimes.com]. There can only be one or two Bill Gates' so advising millions of people to do that is not a great idea. And, to poke a hole in your logic he technically did graduate [slashdot.org].
Re:The Net is no Substitution for University (Score:3, Interesting)
Let the bubble burst (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm 100% with on the issue of the higher education bubble. The costs involved are in no way justified by reality... there's just no way to stretch supply and demand to explain both the ridiculous costs and the way the system is rigged to artificially raise those costs.
One of the newspaper pundits with an economics background... maybe Thomas Sowell, I'm not sure... was arguing against a proposed grant to all parents for college. Someone in Congress was tossing around the idea of sending every set a parents $5000 per child to help with college costs. The pundit argued that if you did that, nothing would be helped, because what would happen is that every college would just raise their tuition by $5000. I think he was probably right about that.
As a self-taught programmer... (Score:4, Interesting)
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. Being able to think outside the box is a skill that any good programmer should learn, but not knowing where the box is to begin with puts me at a communication disadvantage when working with a team.
Then again, that's just my experience. People can learn those definitions online just fine -- I tend to learn them on-demand when people mention them. For other fields, being self-taught might not work so great. Some would require materials and equipment too expensive to be self-taught, while others might be too hard to understand without easy access to the insight of a teacher.
And then there are a lot of people who go into school not knowing what they want to do with their lives, and just coast through their first year to find out. The uni experience, exposing them to so many ideas, might end up being better for these people.
(University = lectures) the way (sex = wet spots) (Score:3, Interesting)
Lectures may be a necessary evil, but they're far from the core of a university education. A university education challenges students to begin to independently develop their own knowledge and opinions on subjects, to conduct research to back up those opinions, and generally to think on their own, all using a specific toolset that has been refined over centuries or even millennia (engineering and philosophy can both make the claim) of mental effort. Even in highly technical practice-based fields students have to do a ton of independent learning and development (admittedly at a level that is not of professional calibre but still forms an excellent basis for truly novel work later in their careers). Lectures are just a means for profs to communicate to students the core precepts they want to focus on, and for some students a basic way to approach material so that they can at least pass classes in which they have no real interest. A good professor will personally engage with both kinds of students and get them to engage with the material on an appropriate basis, expanding their mental toolkit.
It's important to recognize that there is a steady pressure to remove this kind of developmental philosophy from secondary education, pushing it out into the postsecondary programs of the world, where it is of practical use. But that push is a sin against the intent of a higher education, and taking away the trappings of university entirely just removes the guidance that students need in order to learn the tools that their forebears have spent so much time refining. It's possible there are gains to be made in getting away from that guidance, but it's hardly likely that the benefit to a few outstanding thinkers would outweigh the danger to those of us of more limited means.
That's already true, but it isn't practical. (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see a job-seeking 'senior' of OCW get through the HR filters when it comes time to make that cash.
Most [HR departments of] companies and corporations still place strict emphasis on diploma and GPA average. Whether or not that's a quantifiable resource to evaluate candidates with is another argument entirely, but a diploma is much more tangible than candidates who "learned" from OCW and the like. Additionally, college isn't just about the paper and the commencement rites; there's a lot to learn from being a proper college student, like networking, time management (REALLY important) and social skills. You don't necessarily even have to live on campus to enjoy those benefits, though it usually helps to do so (if off-campus housing is actually priced at human rates, of course; room and board rates are insane these days).I can't emphasize the time management component enough; unless one has the will of an ox, it's just way too easy to shrug off a class that won't affect your GPA. Not so for the capstone project that's due two months before graduation that determines whether one will even graduate or not.
What I do hope to see is a proliferation of digital text books that cost less and can be updated more often. We already have iPads and will soon have Android tablets that can hold a bookbag's worth of textbooks at a fraction of the weight and cost. Most popular textbooks can already be retrieved through simple means (Google especially) for nothing. I hope the combination of those two leads to a mass shift similar to that which occurred in the music industry where textbooks don't need to be factored in the cost of one's education.
Re:As a self-taught programmer... (Score:3, Interesting)
I had similar problems, being self-taught myself. A book about design patterns and/or algorithms will bring you up to speed very quickly. There is a book called "Design Patterns" by several authors (four I believe). I defiantly recommend it for object-oriented design. I'm not sure if you have this problem as well, but I also recommend the book "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin, it really opened my eyes to how code should be organized, and is a must read for any programmer, but especially self-taught ones.
I haven't found a particularly good algorithms book, does anyone have suggestions?
A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' (Score:5, Interesting)
This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Self-Appointed-Teacher-Runs/65793/ [chronicle.com]
http://www.khanacademy.org/ [khanacademy.org]
What does physical interaction teach? (Score:2, Interesting)
What do you learn from physical interaction with regard to international affairs that you cannot learn from intellectual interaction?
Self-education is possible, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
...it requires considerable self-discipline. If you don't have that, you can't effectively self-educate, which is one reason why we have universities. A major component of the necessary self-discipline involves studying things that don't immediately interest you, recognizing that you don't necessarily know what you need to know. Universities force that sort of thing on you. It's tough -- especially for young people -- because it involves something akin to respect for authority, though not in quite the way that phrase is normally used. It's more a matter of recognizing that experts who have spent their whole lives mastering a particular subject have a broad view of the subject that the beginner does not and cannot have, and that to know the value and utility of a particular area of knowledge, you have to have a thorough knowledge of the larger context in which it fits. Relatively few people have the necessary mental attitude, so again, we have universities.
None of this is new. So free lectures are available online? Big deal. Lectures are a relatively minor component of a university education. Their main function is to provide an overview of facts and concepts that the students then pursue more deeply and thoroughly outside of class. (A transcript of a semester worth of lectures is dwarfed by the content of the accompanying textbooks.) If you emerge from a university well-educated, it's because you self-educated. The faculty is there to guide you to areas that you might have missed on your own, and the grading system exists to apply the necessary reward/punishment structure for students who as yet lack the motivation and self-discipline to pursue the work for its own sake.
The overwhelming majority of the information you need is in books. You can get many of them free from a decent library, and used textbooks are dirt cheap off campus when the new editions come out every year or two -- if you're self-educating, you don't have to participate in the pricey new edition scam, after all.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that some universities are sharing their lectures, and I am by no means opposed to self-education: I'm an autodidact, and I've done quite well for myself. But self-education is hard, and most people aren't cut out for it. And all of the resources you need have been available since well before the integrated circuit. If you think you can do it, and you're prepared to bust your ass doing it, then go out and do it. If, however, you think the availability of online lectures has been the critical missing component, you'd better just hunt for financial aid and get into a college somewhere.
Would MS hire you if you follow this advice? (Score:1, Interesting)
Simple question: If you followed Gates' advice, would Microsoft hire you? When they start hiring people with a web education, I'll pay attention to it.
Let me get this straight (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Net is no Substitution for University (Score:2, Interesting)
I left college because it wasnt good enough. I got a good education on programming because I knew nothing about it and MSDN was still a fledgling site. Now, you could learn a lot more from MSDN than you could from a book or a professor.
Re:Instant /msg on your school's IRC server (Score:1, Interesting)
That applies to grad school. Not very much to undergraduate degrees. They are cattle calls that show who can finish a 4 year project despite dealing with arbitrary rules, various evil professors, etc.
I may have talked to 3 professors during my bachelors. One of those I regretted since the prof was an idiot that thought if not for copy protection ibm programs would run on mac's.
undergrad programs may serve to identify the better students as well.
Under grad degrees are too expensive and could be made cheaper and equally effective using online courses (in fact there are a lot of good online degrees now).
Re:That learning has nothing to do with the subjec (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the last homeworks in the spring was "five pretty straightforward questions". That phrase meant they were the spawn of hell, on steroids and PCP, armed with whips and chains. I did problem 2a on the board one afternoon(s). After 3 hours of derivation, we called it quits. The next day, I did another 2 hours of derivation, with 5 other people checking my calc, algebra, units, etc. It took us collectively 5 hours to do "Problem 2a" for that set. If we hadn't done it together, we'd never have even finished. Working through problems as a group was mindblowingly awesome, and taught us all a great deal. It also prevented complete burn-out. And that might have been the most beneficial thing of all...