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.

Comments

Re:"Good Will Hunting" scenario

[painandgreed]

There's so little taught in a university course that I couldn't read off a public library.

Actually, I doubt that. Most public libraries simply aren't interested the technical books and journals needed to provide a university level education and research. They're more interested in what the public wants and reads and have limited budgets to provide it. After leaving the university system for the real world, I kept up with some of my research and tried using the local public library. The references were there to tell me what I needed, but they had none of the required reading. From there I had to go to the local university library and search for things, and even then I had to leave the main library and use the departmental libraries that were scatted across campus to find books and magazines I needed. Sure, you can get about anything you want via interlibrary loan, but guess where those technical books and journals are coming from, most likely a university library which is being paid for by the university.