Slashdot Mirror
Forget University — Use the Web For Education, Says Gates
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.
While I used to often boast about having learned at least as much on the net as I did in class, the net is no substitution for a formal education. There is value to the structure of coursework, to the demands of learning material and being tested on it, and to requirement to learn to think and apply logic. There is also value in the advise and teaching of professors, as well as the social and academic interaction you have with other students.
The Internet is a wonderful tool, and may become something much greater, but it is certainly no replacement for a university education just yet.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In this land, educators try and get away with doing as little work as possible. We're talking about a system where they cut all of the hands-on activities from the curriculum. No, a multiple choice test does not prove that you know how to work on computer hardware.
How do you do a beer party online?
There should be a set path to follow when being educated. There is hardly any consensus on what would be required knowledge. If for instance someone would state somewhere, *this would be required, and here you can test your skills, everybody would jump on it. A real university would quickly become redundant, if you could participate in official exams.
And, of course, we have learned about this in the web...
The only reason I go to college is to get the paper. =/
It sure won't help your social skills though. There is something to be said for the complete University experience.
how about getting rid of need BS or MS for level 1 jobs and most IT jobs. The need BS or MS just to get on the help desktop is pushing way to many people to go to a Univerity rack up the bills and hope to get a $10 /h IT job and at the same it be overqualified for mcdonalds.
I don't think traditional eduction is going anywhere soon. There are two types of people in this world, the self learners and those that require a structured if not forced educational environment.
Got Code?
I saw this an hour ago, and it came to mind immediately upon seeing the headline and brief.
Brick-and-Mortar schools have been engaged in an 'arms race' for students this past decade, fueled by easy credit and enabled by low academic standards. It's enabled them to offer all kinds of nice perks that are expensive and not central to education, and it has also allowed many universities to grow top-heavy with administrators.
My degree as a mechanical engineer allowed me to get a job with a substantial starting salary, which was necessary to cover my substantial student loans. I came out okay after a few years of aggressively paying down my debt, but there are thousands of folks who are in just as deep as I used to be, with a degree that doesn't open up well-paying fields to them. Though I don't regret the path I took (my life is good), I wouldn't use debt if I had to do it again. There are other ways (in-state, scholarships, military, etc.)
Anyway, from the article:
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, so seeing him say that university isn't necessary is a little unsurprising.
Anybody want my mod points?
Keep in mind who we're talking about when it comes to predictions here.
There's absolutely no doubt that the web is already changing education and revolutionizing it. But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person... with other learners and a teacher in front of you... for much of your formal education.
Anyone can read the Iliad on their own, or teach themselves HTML, or read the words of critics or teachers on a screen. But if you're missing the give and take of the classroom, then you're missing out on vital elements of an education.
"He that teaches himself has a fool for his master" - Ben Franklin
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
I know all about molecular biology:
Fatal exception 0E has occurred in module NTKERNEL.DLL.
I always zoned out in lectures while in school. I probably have ADD or something. I never fell asleep, but every so often I'd either keep thinking about the last thing the proff said, and get behind, or just realize I had gone into standby for about 30-45s and had no hope of catching up. I also find it impossible to take notes and listen at the same time. Listening to Gibert Strange's linear algebra lectures on OCW was infinitely more educational than my original course in college. Partly because he is simply a far superior teacher to the one I had in college, but mostly because I could rewind and listen to what he said again. If I have a question I cannot ask the proff, but I can search it and find a hundred people answering my exact question.
In short, I totally agree that the internet is a better teacher for self motivated students, but this will create an accreditation problem. The right way to fix it is for interviews to get more complex and difficult, but that should really be looked at anyway. Employers are terrible at ascertaining the actual skill level of candidates. So in many first world countries they get stuck with useless mouths to feed because they cannot get rid of them for simply being vastly subpar. Or perhaps I am the only person who works in an office where "programmers" have been made software process facilitators, data entry personnel, or even facilities coordinators (fancy name for the guy who orders pencils), just to get them away from the code. Some of them have management skills and get promoted away from the code, but they tend to harbor a resentment for not being able to contribute earlier in their career, and displace it on the engineers they now manage.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The benefit of a college or university diploma is that it provides a verifiable credential.
As such, a degree from Internet U. will be worth less than one from the University of Phoenix. It would be more akin to a diploma from the School of Hard Knocks. Best of luck in your job search with that as your only credential.
Ya, I think I read that on Wikipedia somewhere.
Seriously, as with any learning experience, you get out what you put in. You can get a bad education from a good school or a good education from a bad (well, less-good) school. Much depends on *your* level of effort and desire to learn.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There's so little taught in a university course that I couldn't read off a public library.
But here's the deal, I don't think the epistemological quest for knowledge motivates me. I learn purely as a way of solving the problems I have. Sometimes real life doesn't even let me near interesting problems, because the cost of failure (and the risk) is too high.
College and teachers have worked as a nice cycle breaker of that situation. They've thrown problems at me, which have taken weeks to solve (or groups of us, weeks to solve). Some of those have seemed pointless, but most of the stuff I remember still have been the ones that I've had to dig up again for some reason or the other (calculus, for instance).
Essentially, without teachers, I'd have never really sat down and banged on a problem for a week - mostly to avoid having the shame of going back without an answer.
On the other hand, I've had at least a few teachers who've cared enough about teaching me than making sure of their paycheck. I don't think the world needs less of those. And I don't think you (or anybody) should stop learning because they're out of uni.
(goes back to reading wikipedia on RCU data structures)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
If you haven't learned how to speak by the end of high school then you're not going to learn how to.
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. 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.
My work here is dung.
There is also another important benefit, that is really easy to understand if you just read a few science, and especially healthcare stories on Slashdot. Just reading the associated comments should generally be sufficient to realize how exquisitely important it is to have some sort of a moderating filter of an "academic community" of professionals. Yes it stifles dissent a bit, and yes there are other downsides that aim to preserve status quo. But the penalties we pay for having such a system pale in comparison to the fact that the upcoming professionals are in general guided to the more reliable sources, and are at least partially shielded from the self-important Charybdis of the "internet knowledge".
Yes, he is right - all the information is out there on the Internet... somewhere. But where you need peer review, and a structured learning environment, is for the Sisyphean task of filtering out the noise... and the amount of noise has gone up exponentially with the advent of the internet and the complete absence of barriers to publication. It's easy enough to spend weeks, months, years on the Internet, perusing websites that are dedicated to supporting strictly one's own point of view, and have it become an essential part of one's worldview. That's how we would up with Vaccines/Autism and HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crowd.
Furthermore, for all its failures, the academic environment does TEACH the students the skills they will need to acquire to be able to interpret primary data on their own, which is a far more important role, compared to teaching the students facts.
If we let the Internet loose on the population to an even greater extent, I shudder to think of the kind of idiocracy we'll be living in, just one generation from now.
I noticed that in most modern cultures, having a lot of money seems to imply automatically that they are right. "Sure, he killed those children, but he's a billionaire." or "Well, this statement seems like bollocks, but it comes from one of the wealthiest persons in the world, so we should pay attention." Problem is, Gates really has no authority regarding higher education or any kind of career that leads to creativity. He's a very successful businessman, that's all. You can make a lot of money just by manipulating powerful people and making the necessary contacts.
Now, if some of the established and creative scientists, engineers or physicians had made this assertion about education, I might listen. But Gates? What does his authority stand on, apart from his money?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
in software does not mean that he has any insight into education.
The web will be the mechanism by which consumers of education will be able to do an end-run around the teachers unions.
Education consumers have little sway over the system beyond moving to a new locality. And the only thing that will change the system is when consumers can say no. And the teachers unions are not about to let that happen.
The web will benefit education consumers as much as it will benefit good teachers and hurt the unions which is why online education will be demonized as inferior to the shit that we are currently being fed.
I admit, I attended a brick and mortar school, but there are simply some things that you learn online that aren't covered in college:
- Cats have horrible spelling and grammar skills
- There are hot and lonely singles in my area that I wasn't even aware of
- My great grandfather was a wealthy Nigerian businessman
- Acai berries cure everything
- Baby Pandas sneeze, and yes, it's amazing
- People that I thought had few friends, actually have many, many hundreds (per Facebook)
- Clock spiders are the scariest ones
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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, so seeing him say that university isn't necessary is a little unsurprising.
Yes, extraordinary people can succeed without college. Steve Jobs did it too. But the fact is that most people aren't extraordinary, and most people with a college degree end up better off than those without one.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I learn much better and faster from books than lectures. The material in books can be refined greatly and precisely, and digested at whatever rate I can manage. Watching someone lecture always leaves me feeling that I could be getting many times the knowledge using a more efficient delivery mechanism.
University was great for me. The sex, the music, meeting academics, the culture, the learning. All of it great. But since I left university my learning needs have changed significantly and content on the internet has grown to address them. I now need to almost rent knowledge. That is, learn something with limited application for a short time for some specific project and then I can go ahead and forget it. There are plenty of good reasons for universities to exist, but I think they need to concentrate on complementing what is available online rather than competing with it. And given that such a wealth of things have become available online recently that simply did not exist before, that means Universities need to change and refocus on becoming centers for bringing people together to create new things and de-emphasize their role in stuffing people with "business friendly" skillsets. That does not mean that they need to drop undergraduate engineering programs, just that they need to concentrate more specifically on what they uniquely bring to the process of learning.
Nullius in verba
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.
Besides, higher education is only about coursework the same way international travel is only about airports...
Would he like to tell the world how it should approach physical therapy based on the one time he sprained his ankle?
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I find I learn much more slowly if I can't discuss things with others.
maybe that's just me.
Absolute statements are never true
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.
Even as a CS major the University offered a major advantage over self-study in terms of the equipment I had access to. I worked during both my BS and MS in CS and the equipment at a state university was far ahead of what most in industry had access to. Open source has greatly narrowed the gap in terms of software, programming languages in particular, but the hardware deficit still exists for the home schooled. Now add having a good project/lab partner sitting next to you staring at the same screen, the same circuit on the lab bench, etc ...
Take it further and consider even the general education chemistry, physics and biology classes. Universities still have a place, but as is usually the case you get what you put into it. There will certainly be home schooled who are more skilled than university trained. However if that capable, curious and hard working home schooled individual had the benefit of a University they may have been able to progress a little farther IMHO.
FWIW, I learned a lot from the University and in parallel I learned a lot from self-study and peers at home. Similar story after graduation, I learned a lot from coworkers and more senior engineers and again from self-study and friends on our own time.
... and the dumb to be dumber. I can't even begin to guess what can happen if this "online" type of education becomes intermingled with, or is only supported by advertising.
I'm off to rewrite my resume and submit to Microsoft. Gone: all the bits about my schooling. Coming in: all the websites I visit.
This is probably venturing into "Ask Slashdot" territory, but, um, Slashdot, in or out?
I'd go beyond that. People have computers at home, very few have particle accelerators.
For anything that is safety critical, no way. Ever. There is a reason for the length and rigor of the education and training process for engineers and doctors. I do not want to cross a bridge built by a guy who read how to do it on some web site.
There is no such thing as overqualified, only retard with a degree in this case.
McDonalds doesn't ignore your application because you're overqualified. They ignore your application because you were too stupid to take off the fact that you were overqualified.
As for the degree for tier one type jobs ... why drop it? There is an abundance of MS and BS graduates out there who aren't really capable of doing much besides being an help desk script reader. At least they proved they could go to class often enough to pass, though they also weren't bright enough to realize it was a waste of money. Sounds like exactly what we expect out of tier one support.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
MIT OpenCourseWare has, almost undoubtedly, the best and strongest educational platform available. The course material, syllabi and problem sets are not only usually provided by leaders in their respective fields (e.g. the Linear Algebra course is 'taught' by the person that wrote the Linear Algebra text I was using at the time...and I was taking it for credit at Courant), but are often much more challenging than comparable material from universities (unless, of course, you go to MIT). Gates uses this as a driver for his argument, so we already knew that.
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.
And not get a $10/hour job doing IT either. (HINT: Most respectable places pay WAY more than that.)
The quality of online education could improve even more when virtual reality labs can be used at low cost. Even then, actually working with lab equipment (bio/medical or engineering) adds greatly to the curriculum. Some of these things are just way to expensive for the average person to purchase.
If you are one of those people who says theres a value to this or that, show us what that value is. Reveal the limitations of the internet education to us. Show us why it's no replacement for a university education.
I think for the liberal arts subjects the internet is a worthy replacement. I think some subjects like science which require work in labs have to be done at a university for sake of experiments and for the equipment. History, social sciences, psychology, most of philosophy and a lot of math subjects can be taught entirely over the web.
This is a false dichotomy. Studying at a university does not preclude you from using the Internet as well - university students benefit from the Internet just as much (if not more) than non-students, in addition to the formal education that they are already receiving.
Social skills can be learned anywhere not just in a University setting. Yes it is valuable to learn how to work the system and politic, but it's not like the classroom is the only place to learn it.
Beh. Proper english can be taught in 30hrs at the community college level. I know, as I didn't get any proper form of edumudcation while in school(yet somehow I managed to get through life just fine), you were taught maybe 1-2 days, a year and by the time you hit highschool you were expected to be proficient. The interesting thing is, I've seen worse with the kids of today then what we got from my generation.
Regardless, the GP is right. Companies pushing for a BS and so on for entry level, are simply being dense. It's the same as requiring a BS to be a garbageman, or mechanic. I've done the latter, not the former, and I've got two different BS's. For the former the ability to grunt work is a plus, for the latter, being able to creatively think of what's causing the problem is a plus.
Om, nomnomnom...
University Rule #1 - the University is a BUSINESS - treat it as such. The main problem is that the university system is built on requiring 75% of your classload to be non-major courses. If you went back, and only had to take your pre-reqs, and your major classes, you'd probably take only 48h and be done in two years. That only benefits the student. Schools aren't interested in churning out grads quickly. Schools, in general, want students to pay money, period. This keeps universities open for business. Remember NAU doing that RFID on kids for attendance?
The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.
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/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
What do you learn from physical interaction with regard to international affairs that you cannot learn from intellectual interaction?
I would tend to agree with gates that university is not really the ultimate way to got, if tons of lectures and school material will be available for everyone soon I have no idea.
Having taken around 3 years of courses at Waterloo I have only found one course with anything worth learning in it so far.
and even if you are in a interesting course that does not mean that the professors know much about the content of the course, can speak english, know enough about teaching to do a good job, or care.
I would far rather watch a lecture online from a professor that is universally believed to be great at all of these things, then attend a lecture in person from a professor likely to be lacking in all of these areas.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The Web is good for "how-to" information. If you need to know how to configure a router or unfreeze a rusty bolt, the Web is there for you. How to approach a problem, not so much.
The Bachelor of Porn is NOT recognized worldwide.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
Mr. Gates has a long history of making warped predictions about the future. Remember this is a guy who has computer monitors hanging on the walls of his house that change the artwork to suit each visitor, because clearly a digitized picture of a masterpiece is just as good as the real thing, right? In the same way, a digitized copy of an education is just as good as a real education, right? But where will chemists perform labwork online? Where will biology students do dissections? Other than being a pale washed-out copy of a real education, there's the problem of quality control. On-line materials are going to include lectures on the "Jewish Communist Bankers" conspiracy written by Josef Goebels, and treatises on how the "government" is hiding reverse-engineered UFO's at "Area 51". What Mr. Gates is doing is hawking yet another revenue generating app for the Windows PC. Look at what the cesspool of the internet has done to corrupt the quality of everyday life, and you can easily see, Mr. Gates concern is for increasing his already vast fortune,. The public welfare can go to hell, as long as Mr. Gates and Microsoft get to charge a toll at the entrance.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
What good is knowledge without connections? After all, everybody knows success doesn't care how much you know, it's how affluent your family is
nepotism rules in this corrupt and evil system
'and making the necessary contacts' - Exactly which is why His kids will be going to Harvard or Yale etc.
As a person who has been engaged in both tradition university and online courses, I can tell you that neither is perfect, but I would have to lean towards Mr. Gates statement. The coursework is similarly structured, there is still interaction between Profs and students, and also student-student interaction. You do lack the physical connection, and therefore the social network you might build, but for a non traditional student like myself, this really has fairly little value in the first place. One of the beauties of online work is that with non-semester based work, you can work at your own pace. So my international studies class I can whiz through, while I can take the extra time and effort on math that my feeble brain requires. To me it is an exercise in efficiency, but at the same time discipline. I find it hard to believe many of the 17-21 year olds who populate the majority of university have the amount of discipline to dedicate themselves to this format. So I think online courses can and will evolve but mostly for non-traditional students. One thing I struggle with though is the disconnect between the thirst for knowledge vs the practical knowledge for the profession I am currently undertaking.
PS. Things like Opencoursewar and the Khan academy have some superior classes!
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Usually, you get no credit. And even if you get credit, it's not credit other institutions would accept. With that said we should be pushing distance learning. Modern universities are like country clubs and they unnecessarily raise the cost of education. The solution is to test people rigorously and in person so that other institutions and employers will take the experience seriously. Community colleges are in the best position to offer online courses for the basics.
When I was in grad school, the ability to speak to a professor, who was an acknowledged expert in his field, ask questions and bounce ideas off of him were what I really paid for.
Then your professor can idle on your school's IRC server and do what you paid for over instant /msg.
You don't just learn social skills by interacting with others. Talking through a problem with someone else is often far more effective than trying to solve it on your own. Something you say may trigger an idea in the other person, which then triggers another idea in you, and so on.
I have [Internet], therefore I am [God].
If you haven't learned how to speak by the end of high school then you're not going to learn how to.
Maybe Joe The Dragon types English better than you can comprehend his native language?
hire people who go to community colleges and tech schools over Universitys that like to make a big deal about there sports teams.
You know smart people don't have the cash to go to the big Universitys or don't want to take on the loans to go to one.
I've got a MSc in comp sci, entry level jobs start at $17/hr...while I get paid $25/hr, under the table, to mow lawns & do landscaping. Yes, I am the worlds most overqualified gardener : p
it would be ease to get part time or short jobs in your field, say a summer, 3 months, a year AND there would be some way to take exams, for a fee... Then I start at the bottom, can study in my own tempo, and can ascend based on my current achievements in some field or factory...
The problem I found in is that, since we are developing, topics are getting more and more difficult, but the length of courses and the way they overlap is suboptimal... I studied for 4 years for EE (swe), but the issue of having to take 4 or 5 courses every half year did take a toll on my nerves, so I dropped university... I simply could not come up with anything positive to say to future employer based on my academic record... My grades were not bad, bud I did not feel neither as expert or professional. In the end the fear of a new course became physical pain in the stomach, and, despite that I am a rather hard fellow from eastern Europe, I had to admit defeat to this shitty system of being thought by people who do not have PRACTICE in the field they teach, but teach from books written by others with tens of years of experience in the industry...
Now, after a long holdup and living on any job I find, I study combinatorics, algebra, and FP in my own time; I finally have time to enjoy the books of Knuth, I have the time to attempt at the more difficult problems in the books, I have the time to take two weeks for a project, and most of all, I do not get constantly surprised of the phenomenon of ill formulated projects and so on...
I'd love to see how many people Microsoft's HR department hired last year who have a completely OCW-based education. This statement will be newsworthy when he makes his firm walk the walk.
The bottomline is that HR departments are mindless bureaucratic drones. And bureaucracies need pieces of papers to do their thinking for them -- which is why degrees and certifications instead of actual talent will always win in corporate America. (Albeit not in entrepreneurial America -- which Microsoft hasn't been in a long, long time. It's odd that Gates still seems to think of himself as an entrepreneur, though.) And HR people care more about the admissions process than what you learn when you are there, because that determines who the best is.
As far as I cat tell, online lectures are good for three groups: (1) homeschooled highschoolers who have surpassed their parents; (2) for those who can't understand their professors because of their thick accents; and/or (3) students who just have bad profs.
At universities that care about undergraduate education, lectures are only a tiny part of the puzzle. Access to better lectures would certainly help a lot of people. But a university composed of online lectures is just going to be the best crappy university, not the best university. Bill Gates knows nothing about education, it's unfortunate that his vast fortune once again gives him the power to appear authoritative on any subject he feels like mouthing off about.
Computer technology is increasingly powerful - of course the opportunity will become available to use the Internet or a software package to learn by yourself all that is needed for a university degree.
BUT how much is really involved in making such a system workable for the run-of-the-mill high school graduate to learn enough for a professional degree? There is a tremendous breadth of knowledge to learn, even if taught at a fairly shallow depth.
If the software is capable of nagging and evaluating the student to ensure that the work is good, the result may be inexpensive education for many people. A very good thing, and a goal that should be sought.
The real target is somewhat hidden - what is the real target? A system that can teach can do. If the software is good enough to guage a student, it is good enough to guage itself. It would probably have to be much better than a student in order to know that the student is adequate. As a student I was unsure of myself, and I did not always believe that even the students in the upper years could do everything correctly in the lower-year problems, yet it seemed that somehow the education system would make the requisite knowledge available to someone staying long enough for a PhD, to become able to handle every situation at the Bachelor level. This conception was downgraded as I learned more, but for a machine it may be possible.
That could mean that acquiring a formal degree is only the starting point because machines will compete for the most basic work done by professionals. Even if machines were not assigned all of this work, there could be an incredible glut of qualified people. Machine education would be possible anywhere there is reliable electricity.
Indeed, the education software would be pushed down into K-12, and students could be graduating at 16 or 17 ready to work. If unemployment in the developed world is at unexpected highs now, just wait and see.
What are people going to do? The path from raw materials to finished products is fairly well charted. Housing was useful in stimulating the economy, and it will become more necessary, not less. The fundamental reason for housing is not to get people employed in making houses and sell houses. No - the fundamental reason for housing is for having places to put the stuff. As machines make more stuff and people keep buying it, it has to go somewhere. The developing world will start catching on too, and the Earth is only so big.
People might think this is crazy, there are people unemployed for years with no prospects in sight, but that is only a correction. As the developing world accumulates more wealth, there will be manufacturers selling globally, with globally recognized brands in every sector. The trick for creating jobs is to stop the selfish thinking of "where am I going to get a job" and to start giving the developing world better opportunities to develop housing and infrastructure. Housing is the place where the stuff goes, and if people can have health and houses they will pay for stuff, and that means business growth and jobs. Which of course leads to technological breakthroughs, computerized education, and job competition, and many other problems.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
While I can't imagine that a (relatively ) passive kind of medium like the Internet will substitute for more traditional education, it can be, and frequently already is, a valuable supplement. It might not be enough to get someone to the point of graduating, but it might get them as far as maybe a second-year level. Even that would be a major step forward in the use of time, money and other resources.
You can't teach iron ore to be gold. In most fields, as long as the person has a reasonable level of intelligence, some reading comprehension, and a true passion for the subject they will do well regardless of academic background.
A guy who has all the time in the world to look at problems, the connections required to discuss them with people who know what they're talking about, and can say things without worrying about financial loss. You don't have to assume it's true --- but don't discard what he says just because he's rich and doesn't personally specialize in the field he's talking about.
Gates can afford to be informed and can grab some of the top experts for a few hours on a whim.
Look for people to hack this and steal their education the way they steal music and movies.
"I totally agree that the internet is a better teacher for self motivated students"
I'd argue that the internet might be a good repository of information resources, but not a good teacher. Depends on your definition of what a teacher is, but a good teacher should be more than a stack of course material with some questions for you to answer at the end of your reading. A good teacher should respond according to how you are learning and be able to guide you based on your strengths and weaknesses, interpret your answers and push you forwards. Also a teacher should be able to facilitate your interactions with other students, who might be your best critics and advisors. I don't think AI is that good yet.
I agree with you that university (and other) qualifications are shorthand solutions to accreditation to simplify employment selection. I don't think the whole answer is to make interviews more difficult and complex though. Often companies don't have the money to spend too long on employee selection and a main challenge for them is to whittle down a selection of perhaps 100 applications to 2 or 3 they can spend time with. I can't see employers agreeing to interview every application for a job, they just can't afford the resources. So using qualifications to reduce the long list to a short list is currently a well tried filter. But I am sure you'd be a rich man if you could find an alternate way of enabling companies to pick good short lists from the total number of applications to their jobs.
but don't discard what he says just because he's rich
You're distorting my words. I don't dismiss Gates because he's rich. I dismiss him because he has no authority to talk about this issue - not from his achievements nor his life. To demonstrate more clearly my position, I'll say that I would be very interested in what Warren Buffet has to say about higher education, since he's not only an educated and accomplished economist; he's an economist that has actually contributed original and thought to his field. He's not just a billionaire, he's a creative economist that points his finger to all (or most) that is wrong with modern corporations, banking and investment.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Its likely not the company that requires it (e.g. your coworkers, your boss, your boss's boss, the CEO) could probably care less what your academic credentials are. They likely care about your ability to consistently do a good job. It is HR. Whatever the reason, HR in companies increasingly and needlessly keep bumping up the requirements for a job. I believe the only two reasons are to legitimize part of their jobs which is interviewing and selecting new hires or to be able to show to their boss that their selection process is giving the company increasingly more educated staff.
The public welfare can go to hell, as long as Mr. Gates and Microsoft get to charge a toll at the entrance.
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/4/MS_Buys_Evil.html
I can just imagine the negotiations on that one.
Learning only comes when there is someone with a whip next to you. The sense of dread that stems from impending tests and the camaraderie of competition are what drive learning. Myself and every other 4.0 student in my life do not have sufficient will power to self-study a topic to a reasonable degree. I tend to jump from topic to topic and assume I have knowledge where I do not, this does not stem from a lack of spent time but rather from the burnt out of pushing ones self to their own pace.
This requires only a system of punishment to be implemented and a ranking system with attached rewards. If the punishment were monetary, this money could be implemented to create the reward system.
Universities offer both, but which is rewarded in our industrialized world? Alas, I've known and worked with any number of highly-certificated idiots who've gained admittance to and advanced in their careers less because they're good at what they do but because their success reinforces and ratifies the privilege of their fellow guild members. And I fear that no small part of the escalating political tension between the Church of Faith and the Church of Reason has to do with resentment against what some folks perceive as the academic ponzi scheme.
This is rich! The jackass who began his rise to power by opposing open software, and through subsequent years used his ill-earned capital and power to give it hell, now blithely suggests that open learning is our future. First, who didn't think of this application of technology a decade ago? Second, isn't it equally clear that the scourge of Windows has all but prevented such open, free distribution and use of teaching material? This is a laughable story.
my major will be trolling !@#!!! my thesis will be on goatse. and i will do an independent study on 2 girls 1 cup
I don't mean to be a troll, but he has been known to be wrong before. He might be considered a successful businessman, but I don't consider him to be a great visionary.
Gene Roddenberry was a great visionary, but that's because he did his research by consulting with great technologists within various fields.
The bottom line for me is that I agree that there is much to be gained from the classroom experience.
If Bill is right, then we're going to see even more unemployment and layoffs in the educational area. Great!
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Respectable places? In this day? What are you talking about, man?
...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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
easier to cheat.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
The fact he doesn't have a Ph.D is misleading. He has a bunch of bachelor and masters degrees. Pretty darn difficult ones if you ask me. Perhaps he saw more value in learning a bunch of related subjects pretty well instead of specializing. Regardless, he is definitely a product of the traditional university system.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
The Web is good for "how-to" information. [...] How to approach a problem, not so much.
Nice.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A07Pj71TUA [ Bill Gates talks about the Khan Academy at Aspen Ideas Festival 2010 ]
I've got a MSc in comp sci, entry level jobs start at $17/hr...while I get paid $25/hr, under the table, to mow lawns & do landscaping. Yes, I am the worlds most overqualified gardener : p
Well, one day you'll be one of the few gardeners who know how to program a gardening robot.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is one of those things that I wish were true. It would be wonderful to be able to give everyone access to the best education around for free, but as someone who teaches both at the high school and university level I can tell you that there is no substitute for having a teacher who can be there for you to answer questions, guide the class when they see confused looks and take the conversation in a different direction if students aren't understanding. Also you can never underestimate the effect that curiosity has on learning. A student who gets excited about a topic will want to ask questions and learn more things immediately and a teacher who can feed that desire is the best motivator in the world ... when you WANT to learn something it becomes easy and fun.
This is the guy who completely failed to predict the effect the internet would have on society... In 1995.
And he's a college dropout.
He a businessman. He's damn good at that. If he wants to suggest marketing strategies I'm all ears.
Irrespective of any arguments made here. There is no question that web education will flourish. $100k per year versus $0. Plus the BEST lecturers, search AND rewind. Come on people. Fuck sleepy lecture halls and 30+ classrooms.
How do you avoid completely theoretical knowledge if you train solely via the internet?
While perhaps this might be suitable for 100% academic fields, sometimes you need hands on experience. I know from my medical training that most of the real knowledge comes from the thousands of hours spent in hospitals seeing patients and constantly being coached by my tutors to think about all the different possibilities for each clinical case. You just can't do that online.
Eventually you have to get your hands dirty. Otherwise anyone with an internet connection today could declare himself a physician (or any other specialized field). After all, pretty much all the theoretical knowledge is already out there. No, Mr. Gates, I disagree. Copy-Paste is not the same as learning. While I realize the rationale with your background (having copied DOS from another company and presented it to IBM in a shiny new wrapper) - just because it worked for you doesn't mean it will always work for everyone.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In Minnesota we've been hearing a lot of this from Gov. Pawlenty, and we'll probably hear more of it when he runs for president. The only thing I have to say to that is that I *guarantee* you, the Gates and Pawlenty children will not be getting their degrees online. Online learning is for other peoples' children, so they can fill their roles in the second tier society, beneath the places reserved for the children of the ruling class.
You are not overqualified, unless gardening requires knowledge of comp.sci. A degree does not make you an expert in every area.
Its already been done.
Clearly video lectures and a university setting each have much to offer. With video lectures you can pause and rewind, go at your own pace, learn from the world's best lecturers rather than your professor who is usually just average, even select a lecturer whose style you prefer. I say we switch to self-paced courses based on video lectures in university classrooms. The professor will still be there in the classroom but he will be focused entirely on his one irreplaceable contribution: answering questions and providing direct feedback to students.
He has a point in that paying $50,000 yearly tuition to attend large lectures where the professor just reads his notes isn't a good deal for students. This is why one of the key measures of educational quality is the degree to which the classroom experience moves *away* from this model. If you're paying that much for tuition, you expect to have small classes and a lot of interaction among professors, TAs, and students.
So the fact that you can provide this inferior educational experience cheaply online isn't an argument for more online learning, so much as it is an illustration of how many universities need to improve teaching and stop giving students the shaft when it comes to their needs vs. the professors' research.
Working with others in classrooms, give-and-take with professors, ability to read body language and non-verbal clues, etc. Having spent a lot of the last 8 years in telecons and VTCs, I know what you lose, particularly when you don't have a lot of face-time with that group.
But then, consider how Microsoft might be different if Gates & Ballmer weren't together at Harvard...
5. is often ìon the goî or often acts as if ìdriven by a motorî
I don't know what that one means, but I identify with all the others, including climbing on office furniture.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Regardless of how much you may learn if you don't go to university then you don't get that crucial piece of paper at the end. This is fine if you intend to startup your own company, but absolutely sucks in the real world. I would like to ask Bill Gates if Microsoft would hire me as an entry level programmer even though I don't have an IT degree to show him.
You need to get your foot in the door, after that no one will care about your degree, but you still need it for that first job.
Interaction requires personal communication, not a slow, text based conversation on a forum.
Physical expressions, reactions, and inter-personal interaction is just as important and sometimes more important than the words.
Forum based communications will just encourage anti-social behavior.
...is that, at its best, university is about a lot more than simply academic education. For many, it can be a chance to interact, sometimes for the first time, with people who are interested in learning, people who don't think the same way you do, but who aren't necessarily wrong, people who are interested in the unusual things you're interested in. It's a chance to find out you're not the centre of things, that you need to grow up a little, that you can start to make your own decisions and need to live with the consequences. It's about life just as much as it's about education.
"Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world."
Well, so far the best lectures I have enjoyed had been old classic style chalk and blackboard lectures. Presented by excellent lecturers/professors. There is and never will be any hightech web replacement for this!
Traditional college and university education has become just too expensive for many, and a lot of people graduate so much in debt it could have been a paid off small home. Along with health care expenses, it is one of the fastest growing expenses that people might have. The net can change this, and make it affordable again, down to very cheap in fact. The net can also make the scheduling more useful for a lot of people, so they can still work and perhaps take care of their kids, etc, and take courses and classes on their schedule, something that fits.
Yes, it might not be *perfect*, but it could be *good enough*, which is what really counts in the long view.
"And what experience do you have that qualifies you for the job of operational manager of this nuclear power plant?"
"Oh, I read some stuff on Wikipedia."
"SWEET! You are hired!"
Accreditation offers a third party (id est, the school) that has to meet specific standard saying "yes, this person has demonstrated an understanding of [whatever your degree is in]." It also brings with it an expectation of and understanding of things that when learning on your own you may gloss over. I know, and though I am speaking for myself here I am certain it applies to many, that when I am self learning it is either trying to find a solution to a particular problem or acquiring a superficial overview of a given subject.
Let me get this straight - you dropped out of university to found microsoft and have lots of money today. okay, but you sold the worst pieces of software shit (objective-quality-measure-wise) until you hired graduate computer scientists to undo all your big big big mistakes and turn your products more and more into what you thought was unnecessarily complex, didn't you?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
As a recent graduate in biological sciences I can see the benefit of university education pretty clearly. The thought that I could get equivalent education home-schooling myself without access to labs and materials is ridiculous. As an example- I tried to study chemistry via distance-learning to meet requirements for the degree and it was basically impossible-no school wanted to take me (and the risk of explosion on).
Secondly university provides access to thought through and prepared materials,problems and ideas that you could go a whole career without meeting. Yet it does this in a safe environment where danage is minimal.
Finally, it gets you away from home to be yourself and learn your own limitations - and lack thereof when you put your mind to it. You have years of employment to wear that self confidence away, may as well start in credit.
Online study has it's place - and so - should hope it does, I run my own education site ( http://smrtr.org/ ). But what online does for facts, basics, broad understanding, university does for depth and perserverance.
How many of us will study something without an immediate goal? I've taught myself to program (Z80, Sam Coupe anyone?) But always with a goal in mind. University provides those goals before you can do damage.
As always, everything has it's place.
PS. Smrtr is open source and built on Django. Developers wanted!
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
On the other hand it's say that you, personally, didn't even finish high school since you are not able to fill in a form to get a username.
I'm completely wrong?
Perhaps you are too.
This is no final draft of an edited novel here - it's quick comments typed in without much thought of spelling or grammar.
Right on! Bill Gates and education?!?? Bwahahahahaha...what a joke.
This is the guy who has drained millions from education systems around the world for licensing fees? Is this the Bill Gates of which you speak? The guy who has manipulated computer illiterate boards of education to sign 'support' contracts, which included paying licensing fees for computers that don't run windoze? The guy who has factories churning out xboxes using child slave labour, when they should be in school?
Don't make me laugh. As an educator, (with 3 genuine university degrees), BIll Gates knows nothing about education. He is simply a very successful business parasite.
"Social skills can be learned anywhere not just in a University setting."
Or so you've heard.
So basically, we should only bother to learn the information that's already out there, and forget about discovering something new.
Jose!!
How many times have I told you to stop using my computer?!
You're Fired!
Free online lectures - teachers obsolete (IMO, online videos are better than a real classroom because you don't have to waste time taking notes and you can rewind and replay the lectures until you completely understand the material).
Free software - programmers obsolete
Patents abolished - no profit in inventing stuff
Copyrights abolished - no payment for authors, musicians, programmers
In the future, unless you're doing some type of creative work, any robot, machine or technology can replace what you're doing. And since the powers that be want to destroy intellectual property, nobody will own anything. This is why the the teachers should assert copyright on those videos and demand a royalty for use of those videos. With web videos on the rise, their careers are in jeopardy. Instead of 30-40 years of secure employment with salaries paid from tuition, they will now receive a one-time payment for creating the video. After that, they'll have to flip burgers.
Gates is an autodidact; he is known for taking entire weeks, secluding himself and reading a stack of books. It's fair to say that most people don't have "reading weeks." The average, millennial collegian lacks the self-discipline to not start playing with their smart-phone ten minutes in to attempting to have a "reading week."
While open course-ware might be good enough for Gates, the direction and reinforcement offered by a traditional university focuses the majority of students.
That doesn't mean is *is* informed. In fact, it probably means he has no idea of how hard it is to be properly informed, and his opinions on a topic are just the first thing that came to his mind until he found a yes-man to agree with him.
He's partially right. The Internet is the best place to get free access to pirated copies of educational materials which otherwise only a tiny minority of people could access by paying huge amounts of money to attend an exclusive university with a great local library.
are better offline. Universities will still be here in 20 years.
I guess that's why he spent 20 million dollars on a new Computer Science building here at Carnegie Mellon University.
I'd rather learn through self motivated education + online lectures + a high calibur mentor (even if it's just fetching their coffee for 8 hrs a day). I'd rather learn by doing and immersing myself in the trade/science then sitting in some lecture hall with 300+ other idiots, all frantically scribbling notes down from some professor who'd rather be somewhere else and can barely speak english (no offence intended, one my favorate profs was indian and was terribly difficult to understand while he was lecturing).
The business definition of overqualified - as in, the way the word is used by people who will use it as a reason to not hire you - is "can easily leave us for a higher paying job". So yes, a master's degree in CS overqualifies him for mowing lawns and doing landscaping. (In his case, it looks like he gets away with it because he's self employed; no boss or HR department to brand him a risky hire.)
Gates actually has *negative* authority to tell people to skip a formal education. Try getting a good tech job at his company without either having a degree or having many years of work experience (which you can no longer begin to accumulate without a degree).
But it will take more like 20 years and not 5.
Furthermore I can easily see traditional universities branching out and while they won't bite the hand that feeds them they will start to offer non traditional and more focused degrees online and compete with the likes of CompTIA. They will do this through computerized testing and examination performed at local universities and community colleges and in more rural areas: satellite community testing centers. In fact I can easily see these types of education certification programs overshadowing more traditional Masters and PhD. programs - though not the traditional university liberal education which has always been and always will be more about a hazing ritual and belonging to social club/class than about education.
Just image if instead of having a degree from just one college someone was certified competent in a wide range of focused topics in a field of study from a couple dozen of the top universities... top Universities would no longer be quite as competitive and would instead be more complimentary. Education might then be more like collecting merit badges. Further if you really learned your subject you could always upgrade later to a more prestigious and expensive certification.
I would even welcome a pass/fail system where %85 or %90 was required to pass rather than confusing it all with grades and test scores.
then u know.......we dun need schools......
Something that hasn't been mentioned is access to tools. Brick and mortar universities have SEM and TEM microscopes, near state of the art computers, instruments, laboratories, etc. that most internet students can't access. Universities have access to databases of current journals, which are very expensive. Also, the universities have individuals (professors and fellow grad students) who have experience using those tools (how and when to calibrate them, how they can be used, etc.) that one learns over a second pitcher of beer. Access to information over the internet is so much better than it was even 10 years ago, but one still needs hands-on experience with the tools, which are first available at brick and mortar Universities, and possibly (if one is fortunate) later in industry. Bill Gates had, for his day, access a very good computer tool, and he used it to begin to get where he wanted to go.
Laugh
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2010/08/08/
then cry
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/42502/
then get back to me that the Glenn Beck U motto really reads:
TYRANNIS OBSEQUUM, SEDITO DEO
(tyrant compliant , dissension god)
I just ground my way through a ridiculously hard first year of graduate school. This is soooo true.... We did homework together (4-8 people) in a room with a chalkboard. Watching someone work through a problem was the most informative thing I've ever witnessed. The second most informative was doing it myself, under the watchful eye of a half dozen people. And the first and second places were only determined because I was a complete novice in the subject, and I was watching some experts. (They had a BA in the area, I had nothing but a good math and physics background)
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...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Virtual lab, virtual professors.
The future may well be internet based education as opposed to universities. This would allow us to choose specific courses for specific skill sets. But what it would not give us is the basic background appropriate for a discipline. Eg. Science, math for engineers and scientists, language skills for journos etc. Further, we will not get a standard evaluation method (which may still vary from school to school) and readiness for the job market. After all, everyone cannot be an enterpreneur.
Bill Gates... going from a guy that doesn't understand the internet and grossly underestimates it to a guy that still doesn't understand the internet and grossly overestimates it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I believe the term he's looking for is "underemployed".
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Points noted, but there's another group that could benefit from online. Those who already have a university degree and either want to brush up, or maybe take related classes.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Your statement said tongue in cheek, but remember one of the justifications for the expansion of broadband in the US and elsewhere is the greater availability of education.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I think he expects everyone to start moving towards a pay microsoft for training in order to get your MCPDDDDDDD or your microsoft certified veterinary surgeon.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
I suggest, the problem with online learning is how to tie it together with the other activities that provide the physical learning and social preparation provided by a physical school.
I seems to me that Western society (like California where I live) needs to switch over to 1/3 the commute distance for everybody everywhere. A neat, but distant analogy is we need to anneal the structural lattice of workers and jobs.
This means lots and lots of people need to be able to move laterally into related but different employment.
So lets look at online education (as has been discussed above, and many shortcomings noted) as a real interesting starting point for re-employment.
Suppose we switch to describing a job in terms of 5 or 6 specific online courses? When you complete those courses, you are at entry level for a specific job.
Suppose, online courses were indexed in a search engine, organized into a tree, staffed with tutors, rated by students and employers?
Go a little further; commented and authored like an Instructable?
How about open source with adaptive exams generated by open source tools?
How about where the local high school "conducts" the copy of the course (maybe an OCW course).
Dodge the academically questionable for profit school system by hosting this program through evening high school.
How about, hosted by high schools? With a monthly meeting for nearby people studying related fields?
How about entire states having "intern days" where every business accepts 5 prospective interns to visit for a day and the whole group of five take home a project to describe and post as yet another Instructable?
So the thinking here is, adapt the online course material to the extremely specific needs of some local employer, enabling a local person to take the job. And second of all, mobilize the boost value of a fresh, enthusiastic new employee with the latest in educational preparation to energize the hiring organization.
So the Idea is... these are ways to convert the rather simple online courses we know today into the learning framework that Western society needs for re-invigorating the "knowledge society" that was proposed by Peter Drucker and others back in the '80s.
I taught myself programming to a commercially acceptable level before entering university, and as such, lectures didn't teach me anything directly useful; however, I still consider the £20,000 debt worth it, as it has been a lot of fun, and I have enough contacts within the industry to keep me employed by word of mouth for life (assuming there's no giant recession that means they all close their job openings at once... doh.)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Really, Bill Gates knowns nothing about anything of importance. His books are ample testimony to that. Read them now and check where his predictions ended up.
If he were to write a book titles "Becoming rich through trickery, deceit and having the right parents", I'd buy it since that is the one area where he beats out everyone else and really knows what he's talking about. Everything else, his guesses are as good as any random tramp on the subway. Seriously.
On the topic, there is not an issue of "some studies have shown". It is generally accepted among all experts in the field of education, that people learn differently. For some, a video feed certainly works - maybe Gates is one of them and makes the usual human error of assuming that everyone else is like him. Other people need the physical presence, or the ability to ask questions. Yet others don't learn anything from the teaching, they learn from the notes they take during class. Often they don't know that, so they need an environment that entices or even forces them to take note - a video feed that they feel they can replay at leisure would mean they lose their means of learning, without noticing. There is a lot more to this, but this is /. so I'll keep it short.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
... the Web is where people will be learning within a few years ...
This from the guy who predicted that nobody would ever need more than 640K or something like that?
What you can learn from the internet alone is "information" - but there is as difference between "knowing about" and "understanding". If you read about, say, fungi, you get to know about fungi; but you may never be able to go out in nature, pick up a toadstool and then determine with any certainty what species it is, since you don't really understand what is important when looking at fungi - fungi is a particular point in case, since they are notoriously variable and you REALLY need practical experience, learned from another person who knows. Get it wrong, and ...
And that is what you get at university: you get to interact with tutors, teachers and so forth, who can say "No, no, you are thinking along the wrong lines, this is what you should do..." On top of that there are all the other skills that you need to learn, which are not formalised or taught in any way: the social skills that are taken for granted, but which are potentially different for each discipline; the practical experience, of which there is so much more than most realise, even in a subject like mathematics; building up personal relations and contacts that you are going to need later on in your career; and so on.
I've got a MSc in comp sci, entry level jobs start at $17/hr...while I get paid $25/hr, under the table, to mow lawns & do landscaping. Yes, I am the worlds most overqualified gardener : p
Maybe you ought to consider building mowbots and building a mowing business yourself.
I have a Batchelor's degree in CS and a Masters degree in Software Engineering. To keep the long story short:
1) the university didn't make me think scientifically. I try to do that in my own spare time, and I get the most help on this from online science forums. I guess I am not the only one, since I haven't seen the university change anyone's perception of reality. Most people come into the university with certain views about important topics, mostly learned from family, and they get out with the same views more or less.
2) the material taught in most courses has little to do with what is happening in the market/industry. Not even the foundations of computer science are not taught in the correct perspective. In order to really understand the taught material, one has to apply it in real projects, and that rarely happens in universities.
3) the lowest common denominator approach results in holding the more advanced students back. And usually the lowest common denominator is quite low, except if you attend the top universities.
4) lectures cover a small percentage of the material. For the rest of the material, you have to read it and understand it yourself.
5) interaction in the class is quite limited, and there is usually a bunch of students that want to dominate the in-class interaction, prohibiting others from participating.
The only possible benefits of universities for me is a) the labs, b) the interaction with other students. But these two things don't require a university, they could happen at a smaller scale.
I cannot believe this is even noteworthy. This was even predicated by my pet lizard 7 years ago. Find something more interesting to post - we don't care for old ideas just because B.G. says something about it.
At least this contrasts nicely with another of today's slashdot stories: "The Net generation isn't"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/08/08/2139210
See Noam Chomsky: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"""
The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of corporations. It's true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It's dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.
"""
For more on rethinking Princeton University's guiding ideology in an alternative post-scarcity way, see an online document I wrote on that:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (about 200 pages)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
To begin with, why filter *before* people get a chance to create things or say things? Why not use review and moderation (like with slashdot) *after* people get a chance create things or say things?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That's a very insightful AC comment, including the idea for a "local community college co-op for access to labs".
I suggested something related here:
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA"
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Build-21000-flexible-fabrication-facilities-across-the-USA/44897-8319
Some other posts on rethinking schooling that I put together, including endless links within them on the bigger picture:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have an online graduate degree. It's garbage compared to a "real" degree. Zero tests in two years, graduated with a 3.9 (got an A- in a stats class because, imagine this, I couldn't get help from a real human).
The only reason I'd suggest an online degree is for people who end up in my situation (military dependent living in Iceland, with no job and nothing to do other than take classes online). I fully plan on going back to the University of Texas to get the same degree.
> did problem 2a on the board one afternoon(s). After 3 hours of derivation, we called it quits.
What was problem 2a? I'm just curious on what Wolfram Alpha would do with it: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
e.g.: http://preview.tinyurl.com/36gppwf
(click on "show steps").
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.
Idiot, or just ahead of his time? If not for copy protection, programs that use Win32 API would run on Darwine. Or by "IBM" do you specifically refer to the pre-Lenovo era, before Macs switched to Intel CPUs?
I once had a yen to learn some higher math. So I went out onto the 'Net to look for tutorials. Specifically I wanted to understand the difference between algebraic and differential topology.
I knew I wouldn't be able to start there, but figured I could start with number theory and higher algebra and work up.
I figured I first needed to find some document that had a recommended sequence for taking math courses. Aside from decoding the course catalogs of university math departments I was unable to find much on that.
I couldn't find online textbooks that were any good. I couldn't find tutorials at all. Tried Wikipedia, and while they have a lot of stuff on math, there is no sequence to it. It's a jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces.
A good 'teach yourself' text needs to have the following:
* Good presentation of the abstract concepts.
* Good presentation of examples -- at lots of them.
* Good problem sets with many fully worked solutions.
Most math books at the best of times are weak on all three. They depend on students having access to profs or grad students to clarify the missing bits. At the otehr end of the spectum they are incomprehensible.
***
I watched a fellow teacher get his masters from U of Phoenix. Talk about a joke. Kerry was a PE teacher, and fit all the archetypes of PE teachers. He was literate, but only read when he had to. His writing was less than clear. Yet he consistently got 90's on his essays. I read one of them, and I would not have given it a mark better than 60 had it been turned in by a grade 10 high school student.
***
I'm currently a tree farmer. (My third career) I looked into taking an online horticulture course from U of Waterloo. The course consisted of 40 modules. Each module had some written material, and a 10 question multiple choice quiz at the end of it. You could review and retake the quiz as often as you wished. (Questions changed from iteration to iteration)
They had 3 sample modules online. The contents of each were trivial. I was able to to all three and get 90% on the questions (there's always one that has ambiguous answers...) in about 45 minutes.
They wanted $400 for the course.
***
My conclusion is that Universities are in no danger of losing their education role to the internet.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Gates is right - but not in the way people are reading him. He's not saying universities are a rip off - he's clumsily saying that the model needs to change. I send my kids to a K-12 academy. It's two days per week in the classroom and three days of self paced, internet based coursework. Under this model, teachers can handle two entire classes in the same time their traditional counterparts can handle one (Blue Fifth Grade on Monday and Thurs, Green Fifth Grade on Tues and Fridays with Wed for administrata and one on ones). If you compare to a traditional public school, that means you need 50% of the staff, 50% of the buildings, and use 50% of the energy. On work at home days, there are often live classes on the internet the kids attend as well.
The result is that my kids have accelerated their learning, and I've got something that helps me as a parent: rigorous progress tracking. Because everything is online, I know if homework isn't done or if my child is having problems with the transitive property. Likewise, teachers know what to help kids with one-on-one, and so fewer kids fall through the cracks or fall off-pace.
Gates is right about books, too. Far too many of the books I had in college were basically used minimally. The prof would have handouts, a guide, and what amounted to a home made textbook you bought at the local copy shop. The book would cost $190, and the other materials, $15. It got to the point that by my senior year I would buy the $15 and borrow a friends textbook if it was needed (I think that happened once).
The materials my kids get with their K-12 school are fantastic, and are clearly not made for a committee. The result is the books do not require a teacher or parent to explain what the book is really saying, and kids become used to reading, trying to figure it out, then asking for help, which is often how independent learning happen in the real world.
-- $G
I'm a big fan of online education, but I find your cynicism well founded. And yes, Pawlenty sucks.
I think we need to rethink education. The United States, at least, has decided that a bachelors degree is a prerequisite for a middle class life. Lots of people have spent years of their life and gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt, only to come out and get a job that could be done as well by a high school grad with a twelve week job skill course under their belt. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who don't have the education that equips them to be an "informed citizenry."
Nobody's going to pay tens of thousands in tuition to become "well rounded" or to learn the material needed to participate creditably in public life. So we seem to have this idea that we can hold the degree out as a +3 wallet upgrade, and sneak in things like scientific literacy through the backdoor.
It's ridiculous. A liberal arts education and job training are two very different things.
My only hope for the class divide you mention is that eventually evaluation software may get so good that incompetents cannot hide behind a piece of prestigious paper.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Forget University, Forget the web - use BOOKS for education.
There's already a name for it: The University of Google. Whoops!
Social Credit would solve everything...
They are about the brief blurb you put on a resume so it isn't automatically thrown away.
When the major corporations are willing to hire people without degrees, then universities might be about education again.
In 2015 we'll all have flying cars, jet packs and ray guns.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
The Web ought to be enough for anybody.
What Bill doesn't see or realize is the huge loss to students in such a learning system. College is not just about learning, but also about social development. The social skills picked up during a four year college experience are a priceless. Just deal with someone who has dropped out of school before or during high school and you will see what I mean.
This goes right along with his "I will stop spam!" claim back in the 90's.
I am shocked and dismayed by the fogeyish attitude exhibited in most of these posts.
Bill Gates is right. University in its traditional form is already obsolete, and the delivery of learning materials via the internet will replace most traditional higher education in less than ten years. Any university that has not made a major shift towards internet delivery will be in crisis about five years from now, with dramatically falling enrollment.
Why should a professor deliver a class to just a few hundred students in a lecture hall, when they can deliver the same lecture to millions of people at probably a lower total cost (as lecture halls don't come cheap)? Why should a university maintain a huge library building groaning with books, when a hard disk the size of one book could contain the entire contents of all of them? And it's not as if these cheaper forms of course delivery are worse - they're actually better. If lectures are supplied in mp3 or video format, students can listen to them on a flexible timetable, and listen again to bits that they didn't understand the first time. If books and journals are delivered in digital format, they are much easier and quicker to search, and there's no inherent limit to the number of people who can view a given text at a time. Students will be able to fit learning around their busy lives. Existing universities will be able to sell most of their buildings, or rent them out to business.
Some on here have asked, what about social interaction, mutual support among students, and personal support from tutors? All of these can be organized via the internet, using a combination of forums, email, voip, chat and clubs. Personal tuition could be an optional extra, which would allow some self-motivated and bright students to save money by doing without.
If all these things are implemented, the cost of a university degree could be reduced by anything from 50% to more than 90%, depending on the course. Some courses, such as mechanical engineering, chemistry, and medicine, will still have face-to-face classes, but even in these subjects the required number of hours of such classes can be significantly reduced by the use of videos and simulation software.
With such huge potential savings, traditional university will not be able to compete.
You may have heard of the Open University. It has more than 160,000 enrolled students, who all study remotely using the internet. Its degrees are respected, and surveys indicate a high level of student satisfaction. On in addition to enrolled students, untold numbers of people use the learning materials it gives away free (22 million downloads from iTunes U, so far). The Open University is in Britain. There are similar institutions in Japan and a few other countries. Why none in the USA? I suspect that the reason is that until recently (2006), the Department of Education operated a rule stipulating federal aid and federal student loans were not available for online courses. Obviously, such a rule would be a disincentive to colleges thinking of developing such courses. Now that it has gone, we can expect to see a rapid expansion of online education in the USA.