[IvoDankolov]

I've received one of these emails as well. Almost makes you wonder how much would offline university degrees be worth in a few years.

Objectively, this is not a new idea. We have been talking about revolutionizing education for years - and free online education is pretty much the ideal. There is even enough material about most scientific fields and areas of study (some are more open than others, though) to become an expert.

So what is the problem? Becoming an expert with enough authority for people to actually listen to you. Easy enough to do it on your own in programming or entrepreneurship you might say. Not so easy in medicine or biochemistry (though I will admit I have no first-hand experience).

In that regard, certifications are a significant next step, provided that they get wide enough acknowledgement. That is the next battlefront, I think - convincing industries, governments and academia that online education is the way to go.

[splatterdash]

I think this will highlight differences among fields of education (?).

Programming is a very pragmatic field. Your ability to code is at its core judged by whether you can program something that works. Don't have a formal education? Whip up several interesting programs / websites on your own, and less people will care about your degree. In addition to that, it's becoming increasingly easy to learn the subject on your own.

Not many other fields are like that. Medicine for example. Sure, you can learn the names of the bones in your body, understand the use cases of different drugs in the market, but can you diagnose a patient? To learn that, you need access to training in real hospitals which are only given to students enrolled offline.

Same thing with biochemistry (needs access to labs and direct mentorship), law (access to courtrooms? or certification from proper boards). Many of these other disciplines are based on initial trust. It takes time for a biochemist or a lawyer until their work results in something. Having an actual (offline) degree places some kind of 'proxy' for the work result, until they actually appear.

I'm not that certain that they can be replaced / revolutionized by online classes. I'm all for revolutionizing education, but I don't think this new approach is able to revolutionize all fields of education.

[ippisl]

> but can you diagnose a patient? To learn that, you need access to training in real hospitals which are only given to students enrolled offline.

There are medical simulation tools that teach you to diagnose patients, train you in surgery , etc.They seem to be very effective as a training tool. One can imagine a certification process that tests you using this tool, and verifies that you have good diagnosis and prescription skills , and maybe part of the treatment skills.

That might be a good enough basis to admit you on a trial basis as a resident, or to a pre-residency short program.

Maybe in a similar fashion, one could build a simulation software that can train biochemists affordably ,and test to see you're qualified enough to work in a lab.

[splatterdash]

Call me a skeptic, but I don't think those simulations can ever replace real-life situations.

The human body is bewilderingly complex that it it still a subject of thousands of researches worldwide. How can you simulate something you don't completely understand?

Plus, in the case of medicine, one needs to know also how to interact with a patient. Is he/she telling the truth about his/her symptoms? Is there something the person's not telling that might affect your diagnosis? What about educating the patient about the disease?

These are real day-to-day situations that can never be simulated.

[ippisl]

How can you simulate something you don't completely understand?

Many medical diseases are reasonably understood, at least at a level we know to associate symptoms with tests and treatment processes.And there is real simulation software that being used in teaching med students, so it must have passed some quality assurance.

Yes , simulations might have a hard time replacing human interactions, but as far as i understand , you learn patient interaction in an environment external to the university(a hospital). There's no reason well educated online students won't have access to those experiences.

[IvoDankolov]

I do agree on that point, but I'm not sure if pragmatic is the right word. Need of a specialized work environment, perhaps. Programming needs one, too, I suppose, but it just happens to be a computer.

Approaching other subjects the same way we do math and programming would be quite monumentally stupid. Could you trust a "doctor" to make the right decisions if his/her experience consists of watching lecture videos on YouTube and answering quizzes?

However, should we completely give up on those fields that require specialized practice? I see it as more of a challenge than a reason to despair. For one thing, you can combine online education with offline practice (provided willingness of all parties involved to experiment with new approaches, which is certainly not a trivial thing to ask). Also, an approach I'd try is having games that simulate the real-world task as close as possible. At some point, you probably would need specialized equipment and/or test subjects. Reducing that to a minimum, though, is in my opinion a very good thing, as it would drive down the cost of education.

[RuchitGarg]

My thoughts on why a real university will always make sense, but for different reasons http://blog.siliconverse.com/2011/12/29/why-you-need-to-go-t...

[johnohara]

Read your blog Ruchit. I agree with your thoughts on human interaction.

I think in a couple of years we will discover that the key benefit to online education is the ability to consistently deliver high quality instructional content to very large numbers of students.

The social component of learning should benefit from this. My hope is that online delivery of instruction will free up time in the classroom for the human dynamic of discussion, problem-solving and shared inquiry.

[ippisl]

It's too early to conclude what are the limits of computer mediated human socialization.It's still a pretty young field.For example, just before something like 6 months , google came out with google+ hangouts, and now some people are cooking together using it, which seems pretty unexpected.

[Jach]

Historically, doctors and lawyers did teach themselves and many would sell their services without the appropriate papers. (Or the appropriate papers were obtainable through a test without requiring spending X amount of hours beforehand.) There's nothing fundamentally different about those fields as opposed to programming that make it so you can't learn the majority of the knowledge you'll need in the field from home. You can definitely diagnose without formal training--there's a story I heard of a guy who was having the signs and symptoms of a heart attack, googled them, realized he was having a heart attack, and called the ambulance. There's a book whose title I forget that describes in fine detail plumages, shapes, and other features about a huge variety of birds, but has no pictures, and it's commonly used by bird watchers to help them classify.

You may have an argument with biochemists since it's still a relatively new field, and specific universities are a decent place to find mentors, whereas historically you might just go seek a mentor from your local village or in the Big City for things like alchemy. The mentor may even have their own "School of Me", we don't have those anymore. Or maybe you might send a math paper to the Big Shot in Math in the UK, and if he likes it, he'll tell his circle of other math guys and suddenly you're "in" and will be recorded in the history books written by other people in the UK.

I think online media has revolutionized all fields of education and will continue to do so, but only in the simple way of making more correct information available and easier to acquire or recall. Self-learning is as old as books and online education only changes the source material from book to computer (which has a ton of benefits of course). I do agree with you that it is unlikely online education will ever completely replace having offline classes with other people, I know I would have preferred a programming mentor when I started out but all I had and knew of was a book. (It didn't occur to me then to seek out mentors at, say, a meetup.) The main reason I agree is because I don't foresee a decoupling of the university degree for a subject Y and a certification for doing Job X in a field sort of related to subject Y any time in the near future for many jobs, such as doctors and lawyers as you mentioned. What would be truly revolutionary for the Plebs is a mandate from the government saying HR departments can't require an accredited education, just as they can't require a particular race/sex/etc. (This won't stop discrimination of course just as the other mandates don't, but it would help I think even if it just dispels the notion that "I need a degree to get a job" that follows directly after "I need a high school diploma / GED to get into college.")

[ippisl]

From what i read, today's online learning is pretty social , not self learning.I guess that's a big part of what enables so many people to be successful in learning at home.

[cal5k]

Part of the problem right now is that online education has such a bad rap - for example, The University of Phoenix is widely recognized as a degree mill. It remains to be seen whether companies/institutions (like Udacity) can get the certification part good enough that it will be worth something.

[jeffreymcmanus]

UoP's bad rep comes not because they're a degree mill but because they have a high dropout rate (which is sort of the opposite problem -- if they were a degree mill their dropout rate would be low).

Their problem is really that they spent many years recruiting unqualified students who used financial aid to attend, telling them things like "it's no problem to take on $100,000 in debt, with a degree you'll easily be able to get a job that pays $100K." Then the student drops out after four semesters and defaults on their loans, leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.

[thomaslangston]

> That is the next battlefront, I think - convincing industries, governments and academia that online education is the way to go.

If the program was an accredited degree, I think it would get us a lot closer. I'm sure that there are some online friendly institutions such as WGU and University of Phoenix who would be interested in offering a low cost CS degree program.

[jonknee]

The University of Phoenix is not interested in anything low cost.

[thomaslangston]

They might be interested in something high margin. See my other comment.

[jeffreymcmanus]

UoP already does quite a bit of online instruction. It's unlikely there's much going on here that they aren't doing already.

[thomaslangston]

The main point is that if they line up credentialing that mirrors Udacity's courses, they can offload the cost of curriculum development and course management and sell the exams and degree, at a substantially higher margin. They can also offer a pure CS degree instead of the IT and MIS degree they currently offer.