[dan-k]

As a replacement for the university, I think this is actually moving in exactly the wrong direction. We've already tried more centralized education (e.g. standardized testing), and it doesn't work. The quality of education any given student receives is proportional to the level to which that education can be personalized to match their interests, abilities, learning styles, etc. Decreasing faculty-student ratios means decreasing personalization. It's just a losing proposition all around.

This sort of system seems more like a replacement for the textbook to me. Traditional textbooks serve the purpose of giving both the instructor and students in a class access to the knowledge of the experts on a subject. This is simply a more interactive way of getting that expert information. Then the personalized part of the education can kick in and not have to worry about helping students memorize basic facts.

[Homunculiheaded]

But online courses actually give you more options as far as personalizing education. At most universities, unless they're very large or very specialized, you're likely to have one professor from a specific subject in a field. With online lectures, even from a reasonably small number of sources you can mix and match. Two personal examples I can think of is supplementing my algorithms class with MIT's algorithms class on OCW, and watching Tom Mitchell's lecture on kernel functions to add depth to the topic as covered in Ng's Ml-class.

Even at great universities there are professors who are better researchers than teaches that still may be a students only option. If you took the top 10, or even 5 teachers on a given subject you could give students the freedom to mix and match as suited their learning style.

Personally I actually find the lectures a poor substitute for a text. I find the Probabilistic Graphical Models textbook a great addition to the pgm class on coursera. Even though the lectures for pgm-class are long and detail, there's still only so much information you can get into a few hours. The information density of a textbook is hard to beat.