BYU Prof. Says University Classrooms Will Be "Irrelevant" By 2020

dragoncortez writes "According to this Deseret News article, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, 'Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living ... today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed.' In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer. Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30."

Comments

Re:Why Pay for a Degree

[Egdiroh]

If everyone in the world has access to the information then why bother paying for the degree? As long as I can prove my understanding of the knowledge then why should I pay a particular university to vouch for me?

By that reasoning most certification programs should be a thing of the past.

Re:Why Pay for a Degree

[UncleTogie]

Interesting idea, but leaves the deaf folks out in the cold.

I should know. Went to a class Saturday where the videos weren't subtitled. Fairly useless to me, but I muddled through.

WITH subtitling, it might have some niche applications in distance education but I just can't see the brick and mortars going for this for all their students.

Re:Classroom interaction is valuable

[cvd6262]

I've taken a class from him. You can sign up to follow his open learning seminar via his blog and wiki. Though his lectures are only on blipTV, he does read everyone's blog and will respond.

I'm also a professor and I find blog-based discussion to be far superior to face-to-face. A few topics require the immediacy of being in person, but many many more conversations are best when each party has the time to think between submitting responses.

However, the headline is taken WAY out of context. This is what he said:

"If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them (what's happening in the economy, affordability, the impacts of technology and openness, etc.)... universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

Cited from his blog

Re:Sure it will.

[WCguru42]

If some teenager takes the SAT and gets a good score in 7th or 8th grade. Could they possibly get into college?

I actually know someone who pulled a 1550 (out of 1600) when he was in eight grade. He asked our school's counselor if he could use that score to get into college and got a pretty quick, "No!" The fact is, SATs are just stupid tests that don't tell you much about somebody. If you manage to get a great score, good for you, but if you can't back that up with good grades in coursework then it's pretty much moot.