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

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 21, 2009 @05:12AM from the not-into-job-security dept.

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."

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Re:Why Pay for a Degree by DragonWriter · 2009-04-21 05:31 · Score: 1, Redundant

If everyone in the world has access to the information then why bother paying for the degree?
Why do people pay for MCSE and similar certifications?

As long as I can prove my understanding of the knowledge then why should I pay a particular university to vouch for me?
As long as they can rely on universities and certifying organizations to vouch for people, at least as a first filter, why would hiring companies put more effort into letting candidates "prove their knowledge" in the first stage of the review process?