Should College Go Online?

An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has a story about the slow pace of technological innovation in higher education, highlighting the reluctance of many universities to take parts of their curriculum online. '[L]ack of funding isn't the only reason that the traditional universities and colleges aren't responding with their own strategic acquisitions. In all industries it's hard to convince successful incumbents that innovations at the low end of the market really matter. That was true even for Sony's Akio Morita, whose top executives didn't like his Walkman, which had no recording capability; it seemed smarter to focus on more-sophisticated products for the high end of the consumer electronics market. Regard for tradition and academic freedom make it particularly hard to undertake apparently low-quality innovations in higher education. But that's true to varying degrees in all industries. Whether the business is computers chips or steel, successful incumbents have difficulty responding to disruptive technologies, often until it's too late.'"

Or maybe not?

[siegeman]

Cause engineers need to learn to be even less socially inept....

College is more than listening to a lecture.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

The best thing you get out of college, if you go to a good one, is not merely learning from the occasional great mind and a bunch of above mediocre minds.

It's that you are surrounded by brilliant people from dozens of fields. They are your community. Sometimes the professors--depending on how much the school emphasizes teaching as opposed to research--but mostly the students. The students you meet at a great college are more intelligent than almost everyone else you will meet in your lifetime.

It's great for networking, too.

Re:Or maybe not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Because colleges/universities are more interested in making money than educating.

Re:Or maybe not?

[rtb61]

There are many public university around the globe, who also do not put their curriculum on-line, largely due to the over-reach of copyright locking out knowledge from the public good, for no other reasons than greed and ego, even when it was taxpayer dollars that paid for those works to be produced.

Even if universities wanted to change, many short sighted lecturers, professors and of course ass hat journal publishers will block it. Can't have the highly profitable text book market (profitable for the publishers only). locked out by open shared technical documents, reports and text books.

Many governments have long forgotten it is not always about making money but more often saving money will produce far better results. Rather than wasting huge sums of money on for profit text books, they should start investing that money in the future and pay for the production of open text books (digital and print, that can continually be revised with minimal investment).

Re:College is more than listening to a lecture.

[517714]

Under seventy years is not "always". Research as a significant portion of the Universities priorities is a product of the twentieth century, specifically the post WWII era. In 1961 Eisenhower warned [h-net.org] us that "a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity." It is relatively rare today that a student is allowed to pursue pure research - the kind that has no direct application in a weapon ^h^h^h^h^h^h product.

Re:Or maybe not?

[JasterBobaMereel]

The problem with working on-Line is that that cheating that is just about being kept ahead of in colleges would be unstoppable, you might as well just print the certificate and get the candidate to fill in their name....

The problem is not that the teaching is lower quality, it is that the students don''t need to learn anything to pass ... and often many employers regard getting a qualification at college to be a sign that they are a well rounded person because of the college experience, regardless of the actual course they took .. you do not get this working on-line