[brokenmasonjars]

My undergrad and grad were in liberal arts. After earning my PhD I took an mpa online as I was bored and able to pay for it out of pocket easily enough. One of the things the stood out for me at least is that I really missed just browsing the rare book collections and all the various microfilms and archives the library the university had. The digital pdf articles weren't really anything special. I probably learned more from the stacks than I did even while working on my dissertation. Actually my one professor one time brought me to the archives and taught me in detail all the numerous odd tricks in researching old paper documents. This has been an important lesson as I research a lot of older non-digitalized archives on personal time for side projects.

In hindsight, I have this conflict of views sort of. If automation goes the ways in which some fear, then physical institutions will provide a place for people to go instead of rioting out in the streets. To build on Salman Khan's thoughts about online education becoming the Aristotle/Plato model while the physical area acts as a place to build projects and so forth.. this could be one way to go [0]. At the same time, I've read a number of books about the atmosphere of campuses pre-1960s. Personally I feel we protest too much these days. So perhaps a focus on online campuses while limiting fewer people to the physical campuses can allow for the protests to die down and perhaps a return to the pre-1960s era. That said, I have my doubt that people are just going to be content sitting at home in mass learning.. so perhaps Salman Khan's ideal will be what emerges. Then again, it would also be ideal that we don't throw out the old way completely. It would be ideal with some smaller liberal arts colleges could be dead set in their ways in just teaching old liberal arts. Ideally without the computer so to encourage actually reading texts in whole and producing critical thinking. This would be the elite probably due to the cost of that education.

My bias yields to the hope that the majority of all jobs are destroyed by automation and that people having nothing else to do but to get phd's in the subject that they are interested in. Perhaps though the access of education will depend on the level of talent and knowledge; for the masses a khan/coursera style approach, for the mid-level an approach that is a hybrid of khan as Plato model and physical interaction for project development. The upper end, the elite would be in person primarily, small classes in cohesive campuses with lack of protests that disturb the open learning environment; of course moocs would be available to these students but the primary purpose would be more old form to develop better critical thinking skills. The moocs, even if PhD programs are developed will suffer the hive mind problems as one can see in say many social media platforms (reddit, facebook, twitter etc).

[0] A Vanity Fair panel discussion with Salman Khan and Reed Hastings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnqaenik93A

edit: added youtube link for reference.