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MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated
jyosim (904245) writes People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? A committee at MIT exploring the future of the elite school suggested that courses might now be outdated, and recommended creating learning modules that students could mix and match. The report imagines a world in which students can take online courses they assemble themselves from parts they find online: "Much like a playlist on iTunes, a student could pick and choose the elements of a calculus or a biology course offered across the edX platform to meet his or her needs."
The point of a structured educational degree is to give you a damn well rounded knowledge set of the topic, giving you a reasoned idea why the individual components of the topical area are important as a whole.
Giving students the ability to pick and choose on a much finer basis allows them to potentially learn the mechanics of how to conduct experiments without covering the ethical considerations of conduction experiments. That isn't going to end well...
Sometimes a students individual educational "needs" (rather, the term in the summary is wrong, it should be "wants" - the student "wants" to study the fun stuff, and "wants" to avoid the drudgery) is not the same as the "needs" of society as a whole as society would benefit more from graduates with a well rounded knowledge base rather than an enhanced specialism straight out of university.