[Astrohacker]

Cool. But is the future of education really having professors give lectures, except now it's online?

Here are some brainstorm ideas for alternatives:

* Allow anyone, not just existing professors, create a course on any topic and of any length. May the best teachers win.

* Allow and encourage students to make their own lectures and courses.

* Enable and encourage two-way communication. Perhaps people can post responses to other people's lectures.

[keiferski]

Those don't address the credential aspect of a degree program.

[troymc]

Bingo. Accreditation-on-demand is the second half of the puzzle.

One interesting solution is that offered by Western Governors University (created by 19 governors of western US states). It's non-profit, online, low-cost, and... "nationally, regionally, NCATE, and CCNE accredited."

They have a low, flat-rate tutition per term, regardless of how many courses or credits you take. Most interesting of all (I think), they mainly care about what you know, not how much time you spend with WGU: if you already know something, you can get "assessed" (e.g. tested) and move through the program faster.

http://www.wgu.edu/about_WGU/WGU_different

[Astrohacker]

I don't think credentials are very meaningful. An alternative is to let students simply display all their work on the internet. Employers can check out their work to determine their eligibility for a job.

[dagw]

How long do you think it would it take an employer to read through 50 Masters level thesis papers on chemical engineering, plus few hundred shorter lab reports and papers, to determine which of the 50 people applying for a job actually knows anything about chemical engineering? Also where will these potential employees get the lab equipment needed to conduct the experiments necessary to produce this work to put up on the internet?

[wisty]

If there's 50 qualified candidates, then about 3 hours. They will just scan them, and pick the student who's work seems the best fit / highest quality / whatever.

If there's 49 useless candidates, and 1 good one, a similar amount of time. It doesn't take long to spot a sub-par paper, especially if the students have an incentive to be very clear about what they have done.

[jayfuerstenberg]

Good ideas but I think you're describing the internet as it exists in general.

Youtube is only one-way I suppose but it facilitates channels like the Khan Academy ( http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy ).

[Astrohacker]

YouTube is good, but it isn't really designed for education. How can you give out assignments with YouTube? What about paying teachers? A YouTube-for-education would be explicitly designed to bring people together for learning purposes. And money would probably need to be involved... people should be paid to teach. After watching some free samples, students would probably be willing to pay to watch videos from some teachers, or to have their work critiqued by those teachers.

[Miserlou57]

May the best teachers win: www.forgetthetextbook.com

[ErrantX]

http://www.wikiversity.org is trying to head down that sort of route.