Whenever anyone defends the current brick and morder model of college education they do a lot of handwaving about the benefits of small classrooms, access to professors, and the "college experience". In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota, one of the biggest colleges in the world both in terms of enrollment and campus size, most of the professors didn't seem passionate about teaching. They were talking "at" these massive auditoriums filled with half-interested kids. I always resented having to physically go to class, especially since I had a long commute to school every day. Rushing back and forth across this massive campus from class to class seemed ridiculous to me as well. I get that some kids need that personal attention from professors and TAs to learn, but I certainly didn't. I learn best on my own, at my own pace, and in the comfort of my own home.
Perhaps online colleges could replace impersonal experiences at large institutions while freeing up more opportunities for those who really would benefit from smaller classes. Alternately, the education bubble might just continue to swell. Then, those who can't afford the increasingly exclusive, expensive and, therefore, grade-inflated campus experience might be told there is no real problem since they can just 'learn online for free.'
Further, the fact that you managed to learn without small classrooms, contact with professors and a formative campus experience doesn't mean that you wouldn't have benefited from those things. For example, I don't think it's meaningless hand waving to talk about being able to go to Alfred Aho's office hours and ask him pretty much anything you want and get an impromptu interactive lecture. The people who seek out office hours of this sort are often those who are voracious learners who do learn on their own and want to keep learning more.
As for having to rush back and forth or not being in the comfort of your own home, I'd say that comfort is not necessarily synonymous with personal benefit.
I can certainly see udacity type courses replacing the 1000student first year intro lectures - all those stats101 and intro mathematical methods classes.
Lectures aren't a particularly good way of teaching something. They were invented in the middle ages when, before printing, the number of students exceeded the number of copies of the textbook.
Their only real role in a general course it to take attendance and because you don't trust the students to actually spend a week reading the textbook on their own.
A udacity (or Khan academy) type setup where the student HAS to complete each problem is almost as good as a one on one tutorial - and certainly better than sitting at the back of the big lecture theater watching someone read powerpoint slides.
The reason that "multimedia self directed online learning experiences" haven't worked is that they were just as passive as lectures. Having a youtube clip of a lecture on in a window on your browser is about as effective as photocopying a paper as an alternative to reading it!
In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota,
My two postsecondary degrees are both from the University of Minnesota. As a Chinese major in the 1970s, my typical class size for in-major courses shrank down to three or four students total by the third year of the program. (First-year Chinese had fifty students in three sections in those days; second-year had fifteen in one section.) One of the great things about huge brick-and-mortar state universities over the last century has been having a large enough critical mass of students to offer rarely sought courses like Chinese (in those days) or Attic Greek or Classical Nahuatl (any day) or other courses that my friends took while enrolled. Harvard has enough sheer money from its endowment to offer Sanskrit or other rarely studied courses
even if those courses gain very low enrollments. Most other universities subsidize limited enrollments in rare courses with high enrollments in the commonplace courses.
The great thing about more and more university-level courses going online is that eventually there should be a niche for university-level courses delivered online on almost any subject that has ever been treated in a university-level course. That will allow, I hope, curious learners to shop around and figure out which general statistics course (a HUGE enrollment course) and which Aramaic course (a course with tiny enrollment in the best of times) offers the most return of learning for the investment of time, effort, and some amount of money to take the course.
I think many brick-and-mortar universities, and perhaps approximately one state "flagship" university per state, will still be able to survive the onslaught of competition from online courses for a while because of prior claims to credentialing students and the advantage of in-person interaction with other students (and with some less introverted instructors). But further diversity of provision of courses allows each provider to specialize in what it does best, and should make learning more efficient (in the economist's sense of "efficient") for everyone.
P.S. The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.
AFTER EDIT, responding to a point in another comment:
Yes, independent test centers with good test security will help online credentials gain acceptance, and Udacity has already anticipated this problem. Udacity has announced in a blog post, "Udacity in partnership with Pearson VUE announces testing centers,"
a partnership "to make our classes count towards a credential that is recognized by employers." So this is an example of unbundling the package that is currently offered by degree-granting universities. The universities both teach courses and administer tests, and claim therefore to offer credentials that can be trusted. But one group of organizations could offer a wide selection of courses, while another group of organizations offers a wide selection of credentialing tests, and I expect that to be the wave of the future.
> The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.
