Take a look at Coursera if you haven’t. It’s not the only platform for free online courses, but it’s probably the best. It offers thousands of courses about hundreds of topics, by teachers from top-notch universities. But that’s not all.
Most free online courses are just a bunch of lectures which you can decide to follow or not. Coursera is different. It has videos, yes, but it also has exercises. Tests. Assignments. All of them, graded. That is why, if you finish a Coursera class, you get a certificate saying you did. Because they don’t just give them away. They make you work several hours a week and, if you don’t cut it, you fail. And that is great news.
University of Barcelona central building hall, by architect Elies Rogent (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Coursera is not only the democratization of knowledge. Yes: now, anyone with an Internet connection can have access to the best lecturers in the planet, to the most up-to-date information on physics, IT or mathematics. But it’s more than that. Now, anyone can access this information, master it and get certified for it.
The certificates are worthless? Maybe. Now the seem to be. But what will happen when, say, Google realizes people who have taken a number of Coursera classes are just as proficient as those with a university degree? Because, let’s face it: I studied physics in the University of Barcelona. Did I really learn more than what I could’ve learned listening to Lenny Susskind’s lectures? Is my education better than that I would’ve obtained by taking several Coursera classes by Stanford and MIT professors? I doubt it and probably so do you.
English: Lenny Susskind. Genius researcher and lecturer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Coursera is just starting. It will get bigger and meaner. It will one day have competition in the form of other sites offering similar or better content. An education arms race will start. And the best, as always, will come out on top.
What does this mean for traditional university? Right now, the only reason I can see for going to college is the desire to get a degree. Knowledge can be acquired faster and more cheaply online, without much effort. I use Google reader to keep up to date with the most recent trends in physics, computing and neuroscience. I get all the most recently published articles on Arxiv every day without having to move from my couch. I am as well-informed about the latest trends in these areas as many professionals: if an area piques my interest, all I have to do is click on the link.
Image via CrunchBase
My personal feeling is this will one day end up making universities obsolete. Some may subsist: probably only the best, those where being there and interacting with its brilliant teachers will actually make a different. The rest will have no more reason to be: most students will prefer a virtual relation with a genius than a personal one with an average researcher. Maybe these institutions will survive as research centers, but not as learning ones. Given my experience at university, where I had to earn my degree despite my professors’ efforts to make me hate the subject, that may not be such a bad thing.
For now, I will keep joining courses at Coursera and learning. Learning what I want, when I want to, from the best.
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