The courses are nearly identical to what’s offered to enrolled Stanford students, according to the University. However, those taking courses through SEE are not eligible to receive Stanford credit for them.
Are traditional universities the way education can be made freely available?
I'd say yes. Traditional universities are the best equipped to make this curriculum freely available, and the web is making it easier and easier to do so. As a side note, I think Omnisio would be fantastic as a way for students to annotate lecture videos, and ask each other questions.
MIT has taken the lead in a huge way with OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu), and even without other schools following, that is a sizeable corpus of educational material for the avid student.
I agree on the 'best equipped' note. They have the knowledge, resources, materials & experience necessary but. They'd potentially be their own undoing.
It depends. I don't think anyone sees OCW as a substitute for going to school at MIT.
I'd also argue that universities serve other roles beyond education. Universities are gatekeepers, and your degree has signaling value that free online classes never would give you. Further, the exchange of ideas & friendships developed on a real college campus are nearly impossible to duplicate when delivering free educational content online.
The universities are indeed gate keepers.
Your degree signals that you're either a non-legacy who got in thanks to talent/brains/what ever.
Or you are a legacy and have the IQ of a pumpkin. But even as a pumpkin brain, you probably have connections which guarantee your pumpkin brain will stay upper class.
Further, a real college campus gets lots of young ambitious people together in one place and gives them common problems.
This combined with a lot of free time and some but not too much responsibility, creates an environment where you will have more fun and make more friend, then at virtually any other time and place.
You can also make friends with a lot of old money pumpkin brain legacies.
None of the above has anything to do with education, or knowledge.
You gain knowledge at university almost by accident, more osmosis then design.
It depends. I don't think anyone sees OCW as a substitute for going to school at MIT.
That's the whole point. If it were successful, it would be (a substitute). What you are saying is that it isn't a problem, because it's' not too successful.
I'd also argue that universities serve other roles beyond education.
Education is what pins it all together. Imagine a future where degrees are not University centred, courses are available online & testing/evaluation is gets solved separately from the institutions. For one thing, filtering is not necessary. There's infinite room in every degree so if any filtering is done, it needs to be done as part of the testing/evaluation. Universities are a shell in this world. Parents are not likely to cough up the $$ they do currently, for students to make friends.
If it were successful, it would be (a substitute).
I disagree with that definition of success. OCW is very successful -- its goal is fundamentally different from the degree-granting part of MIT.
Success for OCW means that everyone who wants to access university-level content can do it for free. If MIT wants to charge tuition for the "premium" version where you live on campus, can ask questions of the professors, get to know your classmates, get a degree, etc, then they certainly have the right to. That is a scarce resource, and can command a price like many other scarce resources people pay for.
Fair enough, but I hope it's not just a matter of semantics. My definition of the success for making educational materials available is making education available. The absolute goal would be 'the best education.' I admit, this is probably not the goal of this particular project.
Universities have an inherent interest in maintaining a big enough gap between free & premium education.
It seems to me that you're objections are base on an assumption that education cannot be acquired outside of institutions with an equivalent quality or ease. No chance. Universities don't have to worry about that, so no conflict.
I think you're missing the point. Of course being able to ask questions would make a much bigger impact. That's why people go to school. This is not meant to replace that.
> "This isn't all that much different from a textbook, is it?"
1) Video. 2) Textbooks aren't free. 3) Wikipedia isn't organized into bite-sized lectures, and doesn't include ways to evaluate yourself. Wikipedia is a quick reference, not a comprehensive guide.
for more than 2 years now. I have collected
hundreds of video courses from universities
around the world on my blog:
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com