Recently, the announcement for a free online course in AI from Stanford received more than (last estimate) 85,000 student sign-ups and high media coverage and I can see three reasons for that. Firstly because of the topic, AI sounds futuristic. Secondly, because of the professors teaching it, Peter Norvig & Sebastian Thurn who are leading men in the field and lastly, because it’s a first experiment if a class experience can be brought to the web. And for this last reason we will argue in this post.
The difference for that particular class is that it is closer to a class in the old-fashioned way, taken online: it consists of two online lectures a week, digital discussions and a weekly piece of homework that must be completed in order for all online students to pass and at the end you receive a ”statement of accomplishment” that will include information on how well a student did in the course. Stanford Engineering already offers 13 courses for free (you can download the teaching material), MIT since 2007 with OpenCourseWare aims at putting all of its educational materials online for free and many more institutions have gone that way.
Today, with top universities in the US requiring extremely high tuition fees and UK tripling its tuition fees (£9000/year for undergraduate studies), the question arising is whether the internet can be the medium for university- level education in the (near) future, for free. As Thurn told the Times “The vision is: Change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today”. And I totally agree with Thurn, it is wonderful to aim for free universal education to everyone, and internet is the only way to achieve it.
However, there are a few assets that I cannot see how they can be taken into the web. The most important, from a student point of view, is how the environment a university offers can be replaced . There is a study group formed for ai-class on reddit, but is this enough for a university class? Can the interaction between students be limited to an internet forum? Can a conversation with a professor after a lecture be replaced in any way? I can see how an online lecture can help, I’m watching many myself, but only for 101 courses, what about more advanced, graduate topics?
And let’s also think about universities apart from their educational mission, as research institutions, where student’s tuition fees is the main source of their revenue. Will research be their sole purpose in the future, depending only in external funding?
In my opinion, this is a good initiative to bring knowledge to everyone. However, for the reasons stated above and additionally because people - both students and employers - will always seek for a quality stamp, the certificate that an institution offers, makes it difficult to transfer the existing education system to the web. Nevertheless, I can see these problems been tackled in the next few years in one way or another but other problems arising: if you can get a free course from top professors in a field why bother doing anything less than that? Will the education get centralized when the opposite is the goal? The future will tell.
[photo via nytimes]