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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.
I guess you learnt to spell online, huh?
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
Um, he's not at MSFT anymore...
I shudder to think of the kind of idiocracy we'll be living in, just one generation from now.
Heh heh heh. Yuh tawk lahk uh fag.
What does physical interaction teach?
Only on Slashdot...
>a ton of debt
Only in countries with a horrible education system.
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.
the lectures were online, the readings were good, but without physical interaction an entire dimension was missing.
That's trivially true. Lectures and notes are in 2-D. Physical interaction is in 3-D.
Beetle B.