[SuitAndThai]

The claims under "Mass Production of Education" are a little misguided:

1. Online education is not mass produced as he claims; the costs for every video that is downloaded to watch video lecture is incredibly small. Popping up tutorials on YouTube with ads is profitable and sustainable, and that's really all you need for someone who can dedicate themselves to learning more about a topic.

2. I have no idea where he pulls his "winners win" suspicion.

   > why wouldn’t every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, UNM?

If we have an open model of education, people would have the freedom of spending a minimal amount of time to look through a plethora of lectures and figure out what they like the best. In the end, you'll hear the best lecturers echoed from students who watched them. I'm making many assumptions here, and I don't want you to forgive me for making them. But we can't overlook the assumptions that the author is making either, and there are a lot of them.

3. Supposedly, online education kills a personal connection: an argument that has been made many times. Maybe I should point to a popular counter-example: Khan Academy. A very small group of people who manage to supplement the education of an incredible amount of people who want the extra help. They do it for free. They are happy with the results. And the people they do it for are very happy with the results. The argument he's making sounds like there's something to be yearned, but I don't buy it.

Were it not for this section and his rant on the "Funding Climate" (I really don't want to argue about politics here), I would not have thought this to be the rambling of an angry, old man. He may have some valid points, but it's hard not to see this as a giant middle finger to his previous employer as well as venting now that he's at his new job.

[takluyver]

All three of his points seem reasonable to me. If people can take online courses in place of traditional university courses, it's no great leap of imagination that a handful of professors will teach many thousands of students. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the students, but many universities would be left with no teaching role - which could be a reason not to stay in academia.

The personal connection in education is more complicated. It is certainly important, and I don't think the Khan academy is a good counterexample (they apparently have plans for personal mentoring, but the focus seems to be the videos). I could imagine a model where an online course by a distinguished professor is combined with face time with a local mentor, but it would still be a narrower experience than going to a bricks-and-mortar university.

None of that is to say that online education is a bad idea - I think the advantages outweigh the downsides, and it looks like the author does too. But we shouldn't ignore the downsides, and the time to think about mitigating them is now.