The article that appears on Y Combinator: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2012/01/making-universities-obsolete.html brings us an interesting debate.
Making universities obsolete.
Sebastian Thrun has recently announced that he is leaving Stanford to found a free and online university called Udacity. This decision is based on his experiences teaching the famous Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, to 160.000 students who could freely access it online.
The author of the article wonders whether this is really a revolution in the way Higher Education is taught, or whether it is simply another way of distinguishing between those who can access universities and those who cannot.
One of the things he raises, and which I also consider very relevant, is the failures of the conventional higher education model.
Failure #1: Exclusivity.
In the brilliant presentation at DLD Sebastian Thrun talks about how he felt ashamed that he could only teach a few dozen students at a time, and only those who could afford to pay the 30.000$ it costs to attend Stanford. The author estimates that he has taught fewer than 500 students in total during his 8 years on the Harvard faculty, something he considers a very poor track record.
And it gets worse. We all know many faculties that enjoy setting hard classes, in which they teach truly hard material at the beginning of the semester as a method to filter out the weakest students, sometimes, to leave only 2 or 3 really committed and really good students inside the class. This turns out to be very satisfying as a teacher, since you do not need to worry about tutoring the weakest students, and the fewer students you have, the less work there is to do when it comes to grading, etc… There is no drawback to doing this, and there are rarely incentives to teach a larger and more popular course.
Exclusivity is necessary when there is a limited class space, and so many dormitories, and so many dining halls, so one has to be selective about who gets in behind the magnificent doors of the university. It is a way of keeping a renown: even schools, like Harvard, with a «distance education» component, take special care in differentiating the «real» Harvard education from the «distance teaching certificate», lest this feed the anger of the Old Boys by destroying what it means to obtain a Harvard degree (something similar to the reaction when they started to admit women, a long time ago in 1977).
Failure #2: Grades.
Can someone remind me why we still have marks or grades? I like what Sebastian says (quoting Salman Khan) about learning to ride a bicycle: It is not as if you got a fail when learning to ride a bicycle, and then you stop and have to start riding a unicycle. Should the objective of every class not be that every student gets top honours?
Apparently not. The most common argument is that we need grades to distinguish the «good» students from the «bad» ones. The idea presupposes that if you cannot pass a course in the 12 or 13 weeks that a semester lasts then you deserve to fail, no matter the circumstances happening in your life or whether you could have learned it in a longer span of time, or with more support, or whatever. And the really intelligent students, those who get it right the first time and obtain outstanding marks in all their classes, need to rise to the top so that they receive the first fruits of the good jobs, or judicial careers or medical schools, or whatever the prize is they have been working towards during their young lives. «It would not be fair» if everybody got outstanding marks — how would the privileged or the clever boys then gain any advantage over the less privileged or less clever?
It seems to me that all this is incompatible with the idea of education.
Failure #3: Classes
As Sebastian says, universities have been using the class format for more than 1000 years. I used to tell my students that they were *required* to come to my classes, and I never provided my classes on video, lest the students skipped the classes and watched them on YouTube from their rooms. Mostly it was all to make sure that everybody in the class got the benefit of my dynamic and entertaining style of teaching, which I had perfected over the years (including an interpretive choreographic dance that demonstrated the movement of the disk heads during a cleaning operation in a Log-structured filesystem). But mostly this was to boost my ego and get some gratification for working so hard on my classes by having my students physically there in my class as an audience.
Implications
We do not know if Udacity, or Khan Academy and iTunes University are the solution to those problems. However there are two important things that online universities bring to the table: (1) Broadening access to a higher education, and (2) Using technology to explore new learning methods.
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The original article goes on to talk about the risks that the quality of online education does not reach that of the in-person one, or how it could not replace the experience of being physically at the university and that employers consider two categories of university degrees.
However, my personal opinion is that this initiative is only the beginning of something bigger, the path is made by walking and standing still over the assessments made at the start does not influence the fact that this will really move the educational system as a whole forward.
The decision of Stanford was admirable to me and the decision of Sebastian to abandon his post saying “I cannot go back to teaching at Stanford” by founding Udacity is even more so. He wants to enrol 500.000 students for his first course on how to build a search engine, and of course freely and for free.