I work in a high tech field and am constantly disappointed in the slow adaptation of technology. What I propose is a cooperation between all publicly funded universities to gather the "best of" lectures and share them both in the schools and online. There would be audio and video podcasts, youTubes, you could even have a netflix-like download service. Anyone in the world could view and learn from these courses on their own, but more importantly, students could take these in conjunction with a university and a serious testing program to gain credits.
There are still many course that require in-class participation and lab work, but so many "soft" course that would lend themselves to this. In addition, I would pay a licensing fee to History channel, discovery and TLC (and others) to have the rights to use their content in online or classroom situations. I know for myself, that when a program is interesting, I learn much more about history or art or human behavior or many other subjects than I did from a book in high school or college. Of course, being old actually makes history more interesting too.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
I know there are many hurdles to this approach, but no one can tell me we are not smart enough to overcome them. Professors are going to be very protective of both their livelihood and their intellectual property (value added lectures). Professors working for public schools will have to allow their lectures to be disseminated and perhaps the incentive is a small royalty for each person that takes the course for credit. With a small royalty, you now have an incentive to create good content, and that spurs competition and thus innovation. Already, many courses are heavily supported by grad students, for grading, tutoring, and lecturing. Grad students can do the same for high-tech courses. You would have FAQs with each course the evolved over time so provide the best answers to the best questions - this would help make up for lack of interaction.
I leave out private colleges because the incentive to participate is too small, they make plenty of money on tuition and have no need to change, but here we have the government willing to give big tax credits because school is so expensive, yet they are not creating public domain content to be shared at the expense and benefit of the tax payer.
I am a big capitalist, but clearly, education is not a fully capitalist endeavor. Sure rich people will always be able to send their kids to Harvard or Duke (which does provide podcast recordings of classes), but the government is already in the education business, so they just need to get smarter.
Parents too need to rise up and demand these cost savings, why in the world people are willing to pay $40k a year so their child can be a public school teacher making $35k is beyond me. Why don't the payers demand more for their money?
Wouldn't it be cool to take the same "broadcast" class as your kid and be able to discuss and interact with them? I would follow along on a class or two if they were interesting.
It's only part of your idea, but there is a website that started up pretty recently called Academic Earth which is gathering all the lectures currently available online.