[paapi__gudiya]

What is the inherent value that lecturers offer anyways? All the material they teach in classes has been available online for the last 20 years. It makes sense (going by market needs) that they have been driven to such levels of poverty.

The only value universities offer is that one can meet other like-minded and driven people at universities. If some other social structures can offer the same, i.e. a place where one can meet such people, universities will be obsolete too. The only question is when? And are there any organizations out there that already offer such services?

[sgt101]

If the value that your lecturers offered to you was that they stood there and recited course material then you are right. Also your university has done a bad thing.

For me the value of lecturers is that they respond to the needs of the group they are teaching and to the individuals on the outliers of the group. That interaction is what changes the educational trajectory of students from fail->pass and from pass->excel.

I find it hard to harden my heart to the idea that people who work to do that should be ill rewarded for the effort.

[Clubber]

>What is the inherent value that lecturers offer anyways?

Not so much lecturers but curriculum. I can't tell you how many developers I've met that don't know much about designing relational database models, which is arguably the most important, if not the longest lasting part of business application development.

When you are self taught, the stuff you decide to learn, you can really master. It's the stuff that you decide to put off that is actually important that hurts you.

[Larrikin]

If you sit in the back of the class on Facebook the entire lecture the classroom setting still offers the invaluable information of evaluating how well you actually understand the material at the end of the class. Even in project based classes, getting guidance and suggestions of improvements from people that know a lot more about the subject than you is always invaluable.

Obviously if you engage in class you often get immediate clarity on issues that you may have had to research for hours in a different source than your online material.

If you're not taking advantage of the lecturer, then it is on you, and obviously you won't get much more out of it than an online course with little to no feed back

[exclusiv]

My dad went to a public university in the 80s for about $2k/yr back when only 20-25% had a degree. It was an incredible value back then. Now over 33% [1] have a college degree, it costs way too much, you get less and we have amazing content on the web, most of which is free.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

[jmilloy]

To call professors "lecturers" is a straw man. Sure, I had classes, too, that I didn't attend because the material was straightforward and covered in a text book, but other classes were not like that. I got the most value from class in office hours (one-on-one with professors), and the most academic value out of university as a whole in research positions outside of class (again, working with specific professors).

[Torwald]

There are different learning styles. Universities could stay relevant by offering environment for specific styles or a combination thereof, that no other place does. In other words, for some people a given university would be the best way to learn.

Second, shared resources like laboratory equipment or an auditorium can be of value. A university could develop unique offerings there, that other entities wouldn't willing to provide.

[wallace_f]

Frankly weird things to make low cost education not happen--like government making OCW illegal, ostensibly for helpful reasons(1)--raise further questions about academia.

1-reason.com/reasontv/2017/09/26/stossel-entrepreneur-saves-free-college

[dsfyu404ed]

A professor, lecturer and teacher are all very different things and you can be good at any one while being terrible at the other two.

[dredmorbius]

Education is not simply a matter of exposure. The same information that's online has also been available, in books, notes, and other forms, generally, for a century or more, much of it from lending libraries at little or no charge.

If you think about it, humans are unique among all other species in that we do have a dedicated category of productive workers whose only task is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Few other species have any concept of teaching, and without permanent records, no mass culture or collective wisdom that can extend beyond a particular group or tribe.

There are several schools of teaching. One, that I don't subscribe to, is that of the student as a vessel to be filled. This strikes me as all sorts of wrong.

Another takes its lead from the root of the word information itself: to inform. That is, to leave an imprint that recalls the original. This view also recognises the difference between explicit knowledge, that which can be transferred by words or writing, and tacit knowledge, which ultimately has to be experienced. Even much of the information we tend to think of as explicit has a very large element of tacit-nature to it. There are concepts I've been using, working with, and being exposed to (through writing, reading, lectures, video, and even experienc) for decades that I have only recently come up with far better understandings of.

(Example from the past week: maser and laser technology are the molecular equivalents of electronic oscillators used in radio, and achieve much the same ends: a highly uniform, high-capacity information channel. This a realisation despite having first learned of lasers and masers in the 1970s. And yes, this was an insight I'd arrived at myself, but it's taken me three decades on from Uni to reach that stage -- rather inefficient.)

What a good teacher understands is not merely the subject but the transmission of understanding of the subject -- where students get stuck, how to progress through intermediate understandings, exercises which truly cement critical concepts, or operations, or techniques, in the neural wiring of the student's brain. Teaching is itself a skill deeply founded in tacit knowledge, difficult to express in verbal form. As with a coach, or music teacher, or dance instructor, often the trick comes from hints and prompts which nudge the student in the right direction.

Another element is simply enthusiasm for the subject. I've taken classes I really had no particular interest in only to discover that the instructor was deeply immersed in, and truly loved. (I'll occasionally experience this listening to lectures or interviews on topics I'm not particularly interested in, but where the speaker has an absolutely infectious attachment.) Contrast with multiple topics I'd launched into with gusto myself only to find that a teacher, or author, or lecturer was unable to communicate, not only the material itself, but any interest whatsoever in it.

That's the inherent value of lecturers.