[lazerwalker]

What I find problematic about all of these new online education startups (Udacity, Khan Academy, etc) is that they tackle the problem by simply providing online equivalents to traditional didactic learning methods like lectures and textbooks.

A professor standing in front of a group of students lecturing is definitely easy for the professor and cost-efficient to scale up to larger class sizes, but that's just not how a lot of students learn. I'd wager that most HNers learned programming through actually writing code, even those who learned CS through a formal program. In the humanities, I'd argue that the most effective way to learn is through small discussion groups, not a distinguished professor explaining literature or philosophical works to you. Just throwing that up on the internet is an easy way to expand your audience, but providing higher-quality educational materials doesn't do anything to improve the quality of how we educate.

The internet has a lot of potential to improve the quality of education, and there are tons of awesome startups working on it (companies like Codecademy and Coursekit come to mind), but I personally hope the future of online education doesn't look too much like Udacity.

[aik]

I agree, but it does provide value beyond a simple real-life lecture, most notably the fact that you can go at your own pace and rewind/replay at any point. This is huge. In addition, the lectures are much shorter for the most part, which also makes a significant difference.

Concerning the importance of discussion groups, face-to-face interaction, and networking opportunities -- those things are necessary in certain cases, but not all. The courses currently being offered through these sites are most often the ones that don't necessary benefit hugely from these real-life components.

[mephitix]

I don't think they're discouraging the self-discovery component of education. Even Khan Academy's holistic model seems to treat his videos as just the bare-bones - the site encourages lots of practicing on the website and projects. The ML class encouraged coding projects, and Khan Academy's "schools" in CA involved inverting classrooms such that projects and self-discovery was performed in the class while the bite-size lectures were studied outside of class.