| Absolutely. Every time the cost of tertiary education comes up on HN (and elsewhere online) a lot of people reccommend doing the first year or two at a community college and then going to a good state college as a transfer. The problem with that is not everyone has access to a good community college. If your local CCs focus on remedial education for people who are barely ready for 10th grade, let alone college, then the quality of instruction, broadness of course catalog, and peer group will reflect that. I think one possible future for education in CS might be for people to combine electives, pre-requisites, and any remedial classes at a CC with low-level in-major classes from an MOOC.
That would reserve the expensive on-campus years of a degree for a combination of seminars, small tutorial sessions, and project work. The most recent article on the list also notes, correctly, that at many less prestigious universities students already spend most of their time in large lectures with little faculty contact. It's not really honest to say that an MOOC can't replace contact with highly qualified faculty when most students in the American system are not getting that contact anyway. Finally, that same article also covers the fate of people who are culturally rather than financially disadvantaged. Students who don't know how to learn, how to schedule their own time, or how to choose courses. I'm torn on this, on the one hand you could say that this is the fault of poor secondary education and that universities shouldn't have to deal with it at all. The former is certainly true but I think it's a bit of a cop-out for tertiary education to collectively shrug their shoulders and write those students off as not college-ready. I do think that colleges play a factor in filtering for their students a general idea of what they should know and be able to do before they get a degree. I don't see any reason why there won't be a time in the future when someone puts together a course sequence online that leads to a full degree. |