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Online Courses and the $100 Graduate Degree
First time accepted submitter GCA10 writes "Forbes reports on the latest project of Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun (the proponent of self-driving cars.) He's moved on to education now, believing that conventional university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ineffective to survive for long. So he started Udacity, which aims to deliver an online version of a master's degree for $100 per student. From the article: 'Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”'"
You get what you pay for
And yet some of the best things in life are free. It would be nice to add a world class education to that list.
I don't think the issue is whether people can be taught for low amounts money. Clearly they can. Just have a HUGE number listening online, and you can make a living easilly by spreading the cost among them. Per student, it will be very low.
The real problem is the cost of evaluating what students know. You can't give someone a master's degree unless you can evaluate that they know their stuff, or else the degree becomes worthless. And evaluations require tests. True, you *could* make all the tests multiple choice, but what about times when a hands on test in a lab environment is needed? What about times when creativity is required in the answer, or designs have to be drawn, etc, and it can't be fit into a multiple choice test? A computer can't grade that. Humans have to. Hiring TAs for 160,000 people is going to raise the cost far above $100. Unless he plans to just do multiple choice, in which case, his students will likely be good at memorization and not hands on application. And cheating may also be easier with 160,000 people taking anonymous multiple choice tests.
And I would also argue a lot of good educations require hands on lab training too, which is something else that becomes costly when you think of test lab infrastructures for so many people.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
That said, there are many important things that simply can't be taught via computer. I am an evolutionary biologist (specifically human evolution), so that is what I know: you can't learn anatomy at the graduate level without cadavers, period. You can't learn biological variation without dissecting and studying many cadavers. You can't learn comparative anatomy without dissecting animals. You can't learn the fossil record without handling the fossils (or high quality casts). You can't learn population genetics without spending time in a sequencing lab. You can't learn field biology without going to the field. You can't learn paleontology without going to the field. There are many things that I learned in my graduate training that simply can't be taught on a computer.
Personal tutelage by a master is similarly an irreplaceable experience. I've learned an enormous amount of information from watching online lectures and taking online courses in subjects outside of my specialties - but I would absolutely not consider myself on par with people who have traditional graduate training in these fields. I loved the AI class - but Professor Thrun never discussed my ideas with me, criticized my writings on the topic, and certainly never helped me design a project and then execute it. I can't call, Skype, or email authorities in AI to chat about the newest papers in the field - because I simply never met them through the online course.
As enthusiastic as I am about the exciting possibilities of newfangled gadgetry, computers and the internet are still tools with limitations. Powerful tools, but not totipotent tools. Sometimes newer isn't better. Sometimes newer is worse.
Right now we have testing centers for vendor-specific certifications.
Run the classes on-line for whatever price.
Those who just want to learn can stop there.
Those who want a degree can pay to take the tests at the testing centers.
For more complex tests either offer them in central locations or have traveling test sites. These would be more expensive than the other tests, but probably a LOT cheaper than the current model.
Of course it is possible to get a world class education for $100 or less, but education isn't why people go to college. The real reasons to get a college degree go beyond simple knowledge:
A) Get a worthless piece of paper to distinguish yourself. Sure, it isn't good, it isn't a positive trend, but in many fields unless you have a bachelor's or master's degree your application won't even be looked at.
B) Provides opportunities for networking with like minded students and employers. In high school most people couldn't meet with very many like minded students, especially if they were into computer science. There is a reason many start-ups happen in college, you can get all the "right" type of people, you get the people with vision, you get the code monkeys skilled with every programming language under the sun, you get the hardware people and you have thousands of potential customers right at your university.
C) It provides a chance to go out and see the world. Being a student you usually don't have much of anything tying you down to a single country. I mean, sure, you've got family, but spending a year in France, six months in Singapore, a few weeks in Andorra isn't anything major.
D) It provides a lot of "hobby time" to work on pet projects and research, especially at graduate level. When you are employed for a company, everything needs to be justified in terms of profit. In college you can just do things for the heck of it.
Every "book knowledge" thing you can learn in college can be learned for free online. In the rare case it can't be found online, it can be found in the textbook which you can buy without registering for the class. Yes, you do have a handful of really good professors, but the best thing they provide isn't book knowledge, it is guidance.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I did not particularly like his teaching style (in the AI class), however that comment applies to any class, free or not. I do 100% like the idea of offering education for a reasonable price.
Look at it this way; in the future an employer needs to select a new hire. 2 people apply, both with master's degress. One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?
Indeed, you get what you paid for, not.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
As part of that $40k you're also getting contacts and connections. You think Prof. Thrun is going to recommend you to a colleague who might be hiring, or provide a reference for you? Because I know my master's advisor certainly will.
An awful lot of Americans are paying a lot and getting very little out of college right now... especially at for-profit universities. Every taxpayer has an interest in this subject because of federal student loans.
Major reform is going to be necessary because the college debt bubble is going to pop sooner rather than later. I applaud this man's effort to bring some fiscal sanity to the world of higher education.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I paid a total of 10000$ to get a BSc, an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science in Italy. I now work happily as a researcher in the Netherlands.
Higher education should not be treated as an enterprise. Higher knowledge is a very scarce commodity (an online recording system/whatever is not the same thing, otherwise the easily available books would be more than sufficient to get any degree); this means that schools are effectively a monopoly without much competition.
Who can solve this? The state. Look all over Europe for the simple solution: higher education benefits everyone and is paid (because paid it must be) by the state mostly and the end user a little bit. The little bit in some cases is increased if the student is not passing enough exams. There are also *lots* of scholarships that both look at ability and low income, and these often end up supporting poorer students who do not necessarily have excellent results but just ok results.
Why does the state need to step in? Because Communism is great and Mother Russia is close-by? No: the state needs to step in because the gain with more educated citizens is of the collective, not just the subject of the education.
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The business case here is that it is expensive (time-wise) to develop content for 100 students, but becomes much cheaper to do so for 200,000. There is a whole industry built on updating learning material every year. Sure, we learn more about how to effectively teach all the time, but neither our knowledge of the universe (at least the sub-set of that knowledge that we need to teach the average student) nor our knowledge of how to teach better grows so fast as to require a complete re-write of the curriculum each year. There is a lot of fat in the system that can be done away with. This is an attempt to do just that. Maybe we can't effectively teach without face-to-face contact. Maybe we can use that face-to-face contact better. The lines and limits are worth exploring, especially since the cost of keeping the status quo in place is to place effective education out of the reach of most of the worlds population.