[Simucal]

A dream of mine has been that I'd move into academia and teach Computer Science in the latter half of my career. I know that I enjoy teaching and I'd love to be able to devote the remainder of my time to researching topics that interest me in my field. This may be impractical for a lot of reasons, but it has been my dream none the less.

So, when I read posts like this it leaves me somewhat disheartened. The reason it is so disheartening is that I agree with the author on many of his points.

The commoditization of education in particular hit home for me. It seems obvious that online programs like Coursera and Udacity are the future. Traditionally, if you had a world-class professor you were left with the fact that his impact as a teacher wouldn't scale. But now he can teach a million students not just a few hundred a semester. Why settle for a B level professor at some non-top 10 CS program when you can learn from the people who wrote the seminal textbooks on the subject you are learning?

The feeling I'm left with is akin to the feeling I have with the digitization of books. Again, the benefits make the rational part of my brain see that it is the future. But I can't help feel like some part of the experience is lost in the process.

Is there going to even be a place for me in 20 years when I'm looking to teach Computer Science at a state school?

[jerf]

"But I can't help feel like some part of the experience is lost in the process."

Some of the experience is lost in the process. We need not really dance around or wonder about that, it is. But what will be gained will be greater than what is lost, or we'd go back to the old ways, which we won't.

A mass-produced medium-class bed isn't a magnificent hand-carved bed adorned with various and sundry Greek gods and goddesses. But the former scales, and the latter doesn't, and sitting and wringing hands about the experience lost when your bed isn't gloriously hand-carved is missing the point of the mass-produced bed quite badly.

"Is there going to even be a place for me in 20 years when I'm looking to teach Computer Science at a state school?"

A place? Quite likely. But probably not standing in front of a class giving a monologue, because in 20 years the whole "give a monologue to 50 people barely paying attention, hand out assignments to be done one week later, trickle out feedback about performance two week after that" model will be considered laughably quaint, and our grandchildren will ask us why on Earth we ever expected anyone to be educated with such a terrible model. It may not be a state school, either.

A moment of silence for some of the old nuances may be called for, but what is coming is a tidal wave, not a couple incremental advances. It won't be entirely 100% positive, but effectively nobody will be seriously advocating going back to the old ways in 20 years.

[dspeyer]

Rather than await a moment of silence, perhaps now is the time to carefully see what can be preserved. Somewhere in possibility-space is a model in which great minds teach in only the ways that they are well-suited to. Giving the same monologue year after year will likely die, but the teaching time that frees up could be used for some sort of mentorships or discussions or teaching of subtleties.

The first step is to characterize exactly what is lost moving from a traditional model to a Khan-academy-like model. Then to determine how to focus on those things. Then to experiment.

[SoftwareMaven]

Unfortunately, the people writing checks don't ask "how could it be better for the same money?"; they ask, "how could it be equal for less money?"[1] Yes, we have an opportunity to make education much, much better. With the exception of a few places like Harvard and MIT, most of it will pass right by the US.

[1] I see a small possibility where the strong teachers unions get behind this as a future-directed way to save teaching jobs, and that could make all the difference. However, unions aren't too smart at predicting and driving assive upheavals. Instead, they will likely fight any change kicking and screaming.

[jerf]

"Unfortunately, the people writing checks..."

You will know the true revolution is here when "the people writing checks" has moved far closer to "the consumer".

I actually expect about 80% of the true revolutionary reform to essentially come out of the home schooling movement, and trickle up to the universities, who will hold on to the traditional ways the longest. While what the universities are doing now is a critical step, I don't expect them to ever escape "University lectures and homework, but on a computer!" on their own, except that they will eventually have no choice.

[bishnu]

This just means you can't lecture. One thing the digital, scalable lecture isn't going to take away is the importance of one-on-one instruction. In fact it may exacerbate it.

To me this is the future of teaching for most teachers - whereas currently they may spend ~10% of their time one-on-one with students, in a future model I can see that figure climbing to 80-90% percent as students struggle with their homework after watching their Coursera/Udacity lectures.

Not sure how you'll feel about that but personally I always found individual instruction to be the most challenging and rewarding part of teaching :)

[glesica]

Agreed. I have done a bit of teaching and I would gladly turn the monologue over to someone else and spend my time working individually or in small groups with students on projects or helping them gain a deeper understanding of the material.

[lifebeyondfife]

I don't remember the lectures I gave, or the students who fell asleep in my first few tutorials... but I do remember the students who asked me about concepts they didn't fully understand and how great it felt when I could see the idea click in their head.

More of that kind of teaching could be a great thing.

[ctl]

I think it's an overstatement to say that online programs are the future of education. Coursera and Udacity are not selling the same thing that universities are selling, at all, and I find it hard to imagine them affecting higher education substantially.

What do people gain from spending four years in college? Many of them learn something, but most of the value is in the degree, which serves as a signal of competence in the workforce and is a requirement for most jobs. Online programs probably won't provide the same kind of signaling in the foreseeable future. Moreover even students who are primarily interested in learning are unlikely to get as much out of online programs as they do out of college; the rewards structure of college drives many students to work much harder than they would on their own, and (without the signaling reward) online programs can't reproduce that motivation.

Lectures are a very small part of the value proposition that universities make, and of course their functionality is already mostly duplicated by textbooks. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure why American universities primarily teach their students with lectures right now (versus books, video, Socratic method, etc.). I'd guess that the answer is some combination of tradition, students having a fundamental psychological preference for live teaching, and society in general preferring to believe that colleges are selling "education" rather than signaling, motivation, and lifestyle. In particular, I don't at all believe that the dominance of live lecture is driven primarily by a lack of good video materials. And availability of good video materials is the only thing that I see Coursera and Udacity really changing.

So: I'm not sure if there will still be state school professorships in 20 years, but I wouldn't bet against it.

(Note: for the record, I'm a fan of Coursera and Udacity. I also enjoy universities as they are today, though I wouldn't be heartbroken if they changed dramatically.)