| > The problem is the undergrad tuition is helping to subsidize the higher-level research that MIT and other big name schools are known for. Actually MIT undergrad tuition is about 14% of MIT's revenue and about 16% of expenses (all in, not just the teaching portion), numbers which have been remarkably stable over the last 30 years. Undergrads simply aren't that important to a major research institution like MIT which is better thought of as a big research lab with a small school attached (undergrads make up less than 20% of the personnel on campus). > The big universities will NEVER give out high quality equivalents of their courses online... MIT and the other schools know if they gave away their core curriculum's online that are basically the same thing then less people would want to go to the school at the current over inflated rates. Except Open Courseware (thank you Hal Abelson) is exactly that: typically everything handed out by the prof including syllabus, lecture notes, problem sets, clarification notes...everything! And videos of lectures in some cases. And the motivation was precisely the opposite of what you say: "we assembled this stuff; perhaps it's useful for you to make your own course too." > If you guys are looking for a revolution in online education, I hate to say it, but don't look at traditional institutions to do it....The revolution in online education will be done by someone ... that basically has no connections to the traditional education industry but is just very motivated to change the world for the better. Umm, maybe. Sadly, a big part of higher education is credentialism, and for that you need to tie back to institutions. And the big institutions have an interest in such experimentation for the standard big institutional reasons that are not specific to universities (the "satellite campus" system has worked for some big institutions like NYU, and their students in, say, Abu Dabi who never go to NY at all) and there's no reason to think that similar classes of experiments could happen via linkups like U of Il + Coursera). But I agree that new entrants like Kahn are doing interesting experiments that might have a huge, benefit effect in the long run. |