

Can schools survive in the age of the web? - brkumar
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121123-can-schools-survive-the-web-age

======
ronyeh

      As Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman
      of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a
      September article for the MIT Technology Review: 
      “If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school,
      what does that say about kids in New York City who
      do not learn even with school?”
    

Maybe popular TV shows like Jersey Shore should contain public service
announcements like "Snooki says: reading is fun!"

Or maybe we need more on-screen text in games like Call of Duty & Halo. For
example, you can't complete a particular objective unless you figure out that
a paragraph of text tells you to look up a "code word" from page 6 of a real
book like The Lorax.

Schools and teachers aren't our problem. If parents and kids aren't
intrinsically motivated to learn, how can you force them to?

I hope that more American parents will convince their kids to take education
seriously, or else many other countries (with access to American online
courses) will eventually surpass us.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
All people are intrinsically motivated to learn.

People can give up wealth, sex, and addictive drugs. We can fast. We can even
stop breathing for a little while -- or longer, with a little planning. But
short of suicide, you can't stop thinking about the world around you.

~~~
samatman
Actually, learning to stop this process is the goal of several systems of
meditation.

It is by no means an easy thing to do, but it can be done, for short periods
of time, and feels great.

~~~
bpatrianakos
Mthe goal or process of meditation is kind of an oxymoron. You actually are
learning. You're learning to stop thinking briefly. And how do you do it? By
thinking about not thinking. How do you that? Concentrate on your breath. The
whole thing is very strange. You're thinking but you aren't. You're learning
but you aren't. I don't doubt that it feels great and I accept that it is a
beneficial thing to do. But when you really think about it, it's full of
contradictions and oxymorons. It's like a question with no answer.

------
michael_miller
MOOCs might replace a traditional university for a few people, but the top
universities will remain around. The major benefit to college is not the
academics, but the social connections you make. For hackers, this might be
meeting a fellow hacker to start a company with. For a director, it might mean
meeting an actress to star in a movie. For a businessperson it might mean
getting a job at a friend's dad's company.

The central idea behind MOOCs is that education is expensive now. It isn't --
just go to the library and pick up a book. Completely free, and if you're
disciplined enough, probably pretty close to a university quality education.
I'll concede that this doesn't apply to hard science education where you need
sophisticated labs, but it does apply to a lot of students' fields of study.

When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but
the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections.
That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie
about and play frisbee. You need a nice gym, a welcoming student center, and a
nice dorm area for people to socialize. If you were to build a campus solely
around education, it would probably be pretty cheap. Just buy up some cheap
office space in a nondescript office buildings, and have professors give
lectures there. But this isn't what students want.

~~~
s_baby
I see meetme groups forming around MOOC courses. It's not "The College
Experience" but it carries much of the same value.

~~~
mogrim
I've seen this too, it's an interesting development. The virtual community is
also pretty powerful in a lot of the courses.

------
columbo
I've taken a few courses through coursera, udacity, racked up points in khan
and I've watched some videos from the MIT open source libraries, so the answer
to "But what will that mean for traditional institutions?" is they will
(hopefully) change dramatically.

Imagine having 5,000 students all wanting a MSCS, each student writes out a
check for only $20,000 ($5,000 year). So you have $100 million dollars at your
disposal for the complete education... what sort of 'online system' could you
create for $100 million? Not just video, not just lectures, hell you could
make games, interactive puzzles, you could pay to tape some of the brightest
minds in the field... and you could change it --every year--.

You could offer a better experience for a fraction of the price that students
pay today.

edit: fixed confusion over 20k

~~~
tomjen3
If I was paying 20k/year that is in the same ballpark as a real university + I
get all the other stuff, the experince, the connections, the friends, etc.

You are more likely looking at 5k/year. At that price point it becomes a
posibility for those who can't afford to quit their job and go to school but
who still want to improve their life.

Then, from there, you can grow the reputation of online school (which still
have a huge stigma attached to it).

------
bpatrianakos
The web is possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century and has
certainly democratized the way the human race shares knowledge but I don't
think online education can ever become a better or more competitive option
than traditional offline education. There are unique cases where each is
better than the other but I cannot see one overtaking the other. At best I
think online education could become almost equal to traditional education but
never a more popular or better option.

Consider those living in countries where web access is still rare or slow or a
challenge to access. Online education isn't viable for these people though it
may be in the future.

There is no substitute for being educated in the presence of a professor and a
room full of students. You could email, IM, video conference, or voice call
all day long but web based education takes a bit of the humanity out of the
whole experience and it's importance should not be underestimated. Online
education makes things more rigid in some ways. An instructor prepares lessons
as usual, teaches, then receives feedback from students in the form of
questions and their scores on assignments and tests just like usual but theres
an advantage to being present in a room full of students. That advantage is
that it is far easier to tell if students are catching on and if one or more
students are struggling to understand certain concepts then it's easier to
sort of improvise and immediately find out and address the cause of any sort
of problem.

Individual attention suffers with online learning. You can still give
individual attention but for many, having someone there makes all the
difference.

That said, there are just as many benefits to online learning and I have to
say, I don't believe one is better than the other, just that they're different
and that I don't think either will become endangered any time soon.

As someone who went to but did not finish a prestigious university, I think
online education should only be sought out in certain circumstances. The
experiences you have when attending a traditional university are priceless and
cannot be had online. Those experiences aren't part of any curriculum but are
an important part of forming the person you will become after graduation.
Online education seems, at least to me, better for those needing a cheaper
alternative to traditional education. Also those who are unable to physically
attend a university due to, again, cost constraints, or their location would
also seem to be a good fit as well as those folks who are older, need a more
flexible schedule, have difficulty learning in a classroom, and others.

I've dome online and traditional education. They compliment each other well
and both offer certain things the other doesn't but given the hypothetical
choice of choosing all of one and none of the other, I'd take the traditional
experience any day.

The web is the most incredible thing that's happened to us since the
Enlightenment probably but it isn't the cure to all mankind's ills. Online
education is certainly a viable alternative to a traditional education but I
still don't see it being able to rival or outmatch a traditional education.
There are intangibles that come with a traditional education that have no
on,one counterpart. So I doubt traditional schools have anything to fear and
truly hope they don't.

~~~
chimpinee
Some of the negative aspects of schooling:

Destruction of creativity, obedience, deferring to authority, loss of time,
loss of identity, bullying, inability to pursue subjects in depth, learning to
self-censor, second-rate materials, not being allowed to read, not being
allowed to talk, have to ask permission to go to the bathroom, learning to
tease those who fail to self-censor, everybody trying sooo hard to be normal,
belief that exams measure knowledge, being put off math for life, inability to
learn during adulthood, etc.

~~~
bpatrianakos
I think some of those aren't bad. It seems like a few of those points are
things that you maybe had a hard time coping with or know someone who has and
so now you're saying this is a negative consequence of schooling.

Learning to self-censor is a good thing. It doesn't mean you stop thinking
independently, it just means you learn what's appropriate to say to whom, and
how, and when, and where, etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and is an
important part of developing as a person. We can't go around saying "hi, I
think you're fat" when we meet someone overweight and then applaud it because
self-censorship is bad. Kinda lame example but you know what I mean.

Trying to be normal and fit in is also an important part of growing up.
Because I don't know any better, this point makes it sound like you're
promoting non-conformity for the sake of non-conformity. You can be normal and
still be unique. We live in the real world and learning how to choose groups
to be accepted by and subsequently fitting in with them is an essential skill
all humans need to learn. I personally am lacking in that skill so I have lots
of awkward social interactions at work and other places. It's not a good thing
and I wish I did learn to be normal. I can still be myself when its
appropriate but sometimes you there's nothing wrong with just fitting in.

Learning how to handle teasing (regardless of whether you are being teased or
doing the teasing) is, once again, an important part of developing as a
person.

These three points you list are not negatives of schooling at all and they are
just as prevalent outside of an educational environment as they are within
one. Furthermore, being exposed to these things and subsequently learning how
to cope with them makes you a more well rounded person. People who don't go
through these experiences and don't develop these social skills will have a
harder time out in the real world than those who have. It's my personal belief
that people who tend to spend lots of time online (particularly the
stereotypical nerd gamers and coders) have a hard time socially partially
because they have avoided situations where they would have to learn to self-
censor, be teased, tease someone else, trying to fit it. There are other
factors but learning how to get through these challenges would probably help
them a bit.

Now, you do make some good point about second-rate materials. The belief that
exams measure knowledge is also highly debatable and probably false too, I'll
grant you that. That said, the rest of your points sound more like a rejection
of authority than anything that's detrimental to people. There's nothing wrong
to deferring to authority. We live in a civilized society and there's a
structure to it. The key is learning when its justified to stand up to
authority. I can see you're coming from a sincere place but I just can't get
behind you on this. It seems more like you're ant-authority for the sake of
being anti-authority and nothing more.

~~~
chimpinee
Well, it's more important where education is going than what any one of us
happens to think. Most people who went to school find it very hard to conceive
of it as a purely bad thing because they themselves had to pay a large
psychological price to adapt to it. They don't understand about memes and how
harmful ideas and institutions can persist. They would rather see it in a
positive light. No doubt ancient Aztecs felt similarly after their relatives
had been sacrificed!

The self-censoring issue is directly linked to creativity. Our first thoughts
are the most creative; however, people learn to censor them so that these
don't reach the level of awareness. Thus they don't have the option either to
criticise or to enact them. HNers have retained a portion of their creativity.
It's the majority and esp. the minimum wagers who have paid the highest price.

Learning to get on with people is a vital part of life but being herded
together to perform make-work with people the same age as you is not the best
way to learn this. Neither is prison nor the army. Voluntary relationships
with friends and colleagues are more instructive, where people are unafraid
and free to leave and there are real creative tasks at stake.

------
mokash
I can't read this article in the UK. <http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png>

Apparently we're allowed to benefit from the profits they make with the BBC
Worldwide service but we're not allowed to actually see the content.

~~~
aspratley
There's a mirror of it here for UK readers:

[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401-8a21fd26c668/a5a7c9f72ab6fd97ada76634883cc87f)

~~~
mokash
Cheers. :)

------
_delirium
One thing the article doesn't touch on is how to replace things other than the
big, sit-in-an-auditorium style introductory lectures. It's plausible MOOCs
are on their way to delivering the equivalent of that educational experience
for much less money. But that's really only the introductory part of
university curriculum. Just as important imo is the part where you do projects
and get hands-on experience.

For example, in my senior-level AI class, we had lectures for the first 2/3 of
the semester (approximately), and then for the last third, picked a project to
do individually or in small teams, and met one-and-one with the professor once
a week to develop and carry out our project. That was _by far_ the most
educational part of that class. And in physics, the physics lab was just as
important as the lecture, possibly even more important when it came to
learning how to actually carry out experiments properly.

I can imagine that kind of learning being tackled, too, but I think it'll
require something considerably more innovative.

~~~
decasteve
All these articles are borne out of the same question: will MOOCs supplant the
education system?

None ask how can MOOCs and online lectures increase the quality of our
education system? What would happen if universities adapt to incorporate these
tools?

You hit the nail on the head: more projects, more hands-on, more interaction
with your professors, more labs, more experiments. The auditorium lectures
become redundant thereby freeing up space and time for the aforementioned.

------
byoung2
_As the author and technology theorist Ian Bogost argued earlier this year,
"if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it
suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the
information age?"_

A good analogy would be newspapers vs news websites. In the end, it is still
the same news, but online it is more up-to-date, globally accessible, and more
convenient to access. Lectures suck when they're at 8am and if you miss them
they're gone forever. They also can't be paused or fast-forwarded. But most
importantly, they only happen in one location. Putting them online puts them
in the hands of students across the globe, and gives them the ability to watch
them at any time, at their own pace.

~~~
rimantas
You did nice job listing why lecturers suck. Now try and list why your
teaching videos suck.

~~~
byoung2
Improving is an iterative process. You find problems, solve them, and then
find more. Videos suck because they're static, they don't answer questions. So
you make them adaptive. And so on.

------
jiggy2011
I think I would have done better at school if there had been a camera at the
back of the class and ability to download the videos later.

Firstly, people tend to talk a lot in class. This is distracting and makes it
difficult to hear what is being said. Perhaps if there was a recoding nobody
would want their rude behaviour documented.

When listening to a class it is also very easy for your concentration to
wander for long enough that you have trouble keeping up with the rest of the
lecture because you missed something. A video trivially allows your to rewind
those minutes.

------
rimantas
That's the same as the question "can schools survive in the age of the book".
Education is not technology/media.

~~~
_delirium
That's something I've been thinking about lately. I personally don't learn any
better from MOOCs than I do from working my way through a good textbook. So if
universities were going to be obsoleted, the printing press is what should've
done it, if most people learned like me. However, MOOC advocates are, I
presume, betting that for most people a good series of video lectures is a
more compelling way of learning than a good textbook. I wonder if it's the
modality (visual vs. aural learners, etc.), the social pressure of people
"taking a class" together, or something else.

edit: For me personally, the biggest advance the internet has brought in
autodidacticism is actually mainly on the textual front too: Wikipedia makes
it much easier to find and navigate bodies of knowledge, and nicely
complements the linear style of learning that you get by working through a
textbook. There have long been encyclopedias of course, but Wikipedia is much
bigger than most, always at hand, and somehow much easier to get engrossed in.

~~~
rayiner
I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more in these contexts, but there is
already precedent for MOOC's: bar study courses. For about $3,000, BarBri will
teach you all the law you need to pass the bar. Everyone takes the course,
because law schools, ivory towers that they are, don't actually teach you much
of the law.

BarBri courses include all the things you have with Coursera, etc. Video
lectures backed up with a big stack of paper course outlines (for reference),
work sheets, online sample questions, assignment submission, etc.

My experience with my bar course was that all the online/video stuff is
superfluous. The most efficient way to learn the material is not to sit
through the video lectures, but to work through the outlines, taking notes and
doing practice questions. Text is just a vastly superior format to video for
conveying information quickly. The real benefit of the course format is not
the online/video crap, but collecting all the information into a series of
self-contained outlines. That's the big advantage of the course over just
going to a library.

Of course we've had paper course outlines for god knows how long. And they
haven't replaced law school, even in California where there is no requirement
to go to law school. I didn't go to law school to learn the law--that was what
BarBri was for. I went to law school to get a name on my resume that would get
me a job, connect with professors who could serve as career mentors, and start
building my professional network. The education itself is just 10% of the
whole purpose of school.

~~~
tptacek
So, if I didn't care about the name on my resume, already having as I do a
pretty decent career, why can't I just skip law school and do the online law
course?

~~~
_delirium
Are you asking with a view towards becoming a licensed attorney, or with a
view towards learning a sufficient amount about the law to be qualified to
answer questions / make decisions, without being formally licensed to do so as
a profession?

If it's for formal licensing, only four states let you take the bar exam
without attending an ABA-accredited law school (California, Vermont, Virginia,
Washington). A few others have provisions for you to attend only 1 or 2 years
of an accredited law school, and then do self-study for the remaining portion
without actually earning a J.D. as a prerequisite (Maine, New York, Wyoming).
But even in these states you typically have to engage in some kind of approved
course of study, although at least in California, this _can_ be via an online
law course.

I haven't looked into the others, but at one point I looked into it in
California, and the two options are: 1) attend an unaccredited law school
(could be an online one) for the equivalent of a 4-year course of study, and
take certain exams along the way; or 2) follow a 4-year approved course of
independent study supervised by a judge or a legal practice (the classic
"reading law" apprenticeship option that was once standard, but has been
phased out in most states).

~~~
tptacek
I wouldn't even mind law school! My problem is, I've only got a semester of
undergrad. I was a professional developer more or less directly out of high
school.

~~~
rdl
The easiest solution if you want to get a great credential with no undergrad
seems to be a London Business School or London School of Economics MBA, which
does not depend on undergraduate degree, followed by using the MBA as a
credential to apply to other schools (PhD programs or potentially law school).

The other way with some programs is to do "special student" (non-degree) for
grad school, and then get undergrad and grad requirements out of the way at
the same time. I believe there are no-prior-undergrad PhDs through this
method, at least in math.

------
OSButler
The most important asset for a private school is connections.

I've experienced schools that were directly tied to the industry, so that the
local companies would first go there and check with the teachers to see what
student would be suitable for their company, instead of advertising the
position through the usual channels.

The student would go from graduation right into employment without having to
do any actual job search.

If you are an institution that has an established connection to the local
industry, then I think such a school would be able to survive the online
offerings from other international schools/sites.

~~~
Tycho
Also allow wealthy families to network with each other, on top of whatever
connections the school itself sets up.

~~~
OSButler
I'm not sure how that "wealthy families" part fits in with this?

Maybe this depends on the country, but one example that relates to my original
comment was a school which specialized in university students who are about to
or just finished their studies and wanted to enhance their studies in a
specific area.

The whole program was less than a year and the costs would be easily covered
even by a few months of part-time work, so we're not talking having to get an
actual loan to even attend.

~~~
Tycho
I meant private schools as in high-schools. Didn't realize you were talking
about schools for adults.

------
ChuckMcM
I always wonder about headlines like this, schools exist to educate students,
if they provide value to the students they will exist. Its the nature of the
market. If they don't provide value they will cease to exist (unless
maintained by an unholy subsidiary of tax payer money)

~~~
scarmig
Even absent government policy, it's quite possible for contingent
organizations to exist long past their sell-by date, because of the ravine
their existence has sketched in the market landscape.

And with government subsidies--and imagining the American education market as
moving toward existing without them is a flight of fancy--they can be
disastrously harmful and still continue forever.

------
Tycho
_Finally_ , mainstream media addresses the elephant in the room re:education.

------
rprasad
Yes, schools will survive in the age of the web. Most people learn via
interaction, not passive observation. That's the reason we have homework, and
labs, and (at the K12 level) all sorts of silly in-class activities.

College education will not change much either. If the purpose of college was
simply exposure to factual information, they would never have survived the
commercialization of the textbook. Colleges are about higher-level, deeper
interaction with the material. (This means different things for different
majors.) Moreover, colleges provide a simple, relatively efficient way of
proving familiarity or mastery of a subject matter that would be
technologically impossible for a web-course to provide (i.e., prevention of
most forms of cheating).

The web may affect the _number_ of colleges, but it will not affect the
fundamental nature of higher education.

------
mememememememe
What I suspect in the future is a team of really qualified teachers offer
short videos online, like those on KhanAchamdey and use them as supplement.
But I don't see traditional school disappearing because of jobs and keeping a
child at home is very dangerous. Hybrid class runs by having one
recitation/dicussion and the rest online. On the recitation day the students
have to take a quiz to show they watched the videos. What it killed is daily
interaction with others.

You can try to do that in college, but not below college. Kids would enjoy to
go to school just to see their friends.

Another thing is considered is once again jobs. What are you going to do with
millions of teachers? If each school makes a video, only 1/1000000 videos will
be favored.

Online classes have many bad things, and personally I only use it to
supplement my college courses.

