Why free online lectures will destroy universities – unless they get their act together fast. Soon, most students won't bother going old-style universities (Photo: Getty) Across the country, university students sit in lectures every day, listening to someone speak for an hour in crowded theatres.
Most are daydreaming, checking Facebook, surfing the web, texting and tweeting; if they're particularly motivated or the lecture is unusually good, some might actually be paying attention. At the same time, millions of learners around the world are watching world-class lectures online about every subject imaginable, from fractional reserve banking to moral philosophy to pharmacology, supplied by Harvard, MIT, and The Open University. One group gets its education for free, and the other pays thousands of pounds per year. It's a situation that can't continue, and unless universities face up to the internet's fierce competition they won't have any future. We're wrong. Even Adam Smith complained about this problem in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations: Education Tech: Skype's Vision for a More Connected Classroom. Since becoming the CEO of Skype last October, Tony Bates has overseen the launch of a Wi-Fi hotspot service, a partnership with Facebook that produced the social network's first video chat feature, and a pending acquisition by Microsoft.
Though it didn't make as many headlines, Skype also launched its formal education initiative under Bate's leadership. Skype in the Classroom, a dedicated teacher network, came out of beta in March with about 4,000 teachers already signed up. It now has more than 15,000 teachers sharing more than 779 projects on the site. Mashable recently asked Bates about Skype's new education initiatives and the developing education technology space. Bates will also be speaking at Mashable's Social Good Summit in September. What does video chat have to do with education? The education process is moving beyond the traditional classroom/lecture setting.
Personally, have you ever learned something via Skype that you wouldn't have been able to learn without it? Absolutely. Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom. Update | 11:08 p.m.
Read an article by Steve Lohr on keeping abreast of innovation in the Continuing Education special section. A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” Noah Berger for The New York TimesTyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California. The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. 10 Most Popular Professors On YouTube.