Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.

Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web

Interesting.

Edit: Why are my posts being moderated?

 

Test post.

Edit: I guess they're not anymore. Okay.

 

When someone is new to the board their posts go into moderation. This happens for awhile. After a certain number of posts, you go directly to the board.

Pen/Stadium, you might want to read the TOS sticky.

 

Bill Gates made some of the best predictions

 

Pen?
10char.

 

Another new poster.

Mr. Gates you can already do that.

 

I don't see how Pen means another new poster.

 

It does....

 

There is another (not you) new guy named Pen posting....lol

 

Oh... gotcha.

What really threw me off was him addressing me as Pen before he changed his post.

 

You can already learn virtually anything from pre-school through post-grad online for free, and legally as well with open courseware and such. The only issue would be with validating your knowledge, which can be done through exams, such as GED, CLEP, various certs., etc.

 

Changed post?

 

You started off saying "Well, Pen..." or something like that. I clicked to quote your message but by then you moved the mention of "Pen" to your second line. It even says you edited your post. I don't see what's so confusing.

 

Forgot I did that, my bad. I do tend to read my posts and think of a better way to say things. The control panel was showing you both at the same IP address for awhile. Now it is showing you in a completely different place, very far from pen.

 

I don't agree with that.

Just about anywhere, you can already obtain what in effect are the best lectures in the world, totally for free. They are in these damnably low-tech things made out of wood-pulp called... books, and they are found in places that nobody on Degreeinfo or at tech conferences would ever think of visiting (but which are experiencing a surge in patronage from regular people) called...libraries.

That's meant to be sarcastic, but my point is a serious one. Free public libraries are effectively free universities and they've existed for a hundred years or more. I don't think that canning university lectures and streaming them on the internet will really add a great deal to our existing ability to read what lecturers write in their texts. The texts are generally fuller and more complete explanations of the material anyway.

In my opinion, the real value of university professors is that they are interactive. Students can talk to them. Professors actively guide their students, helping them deepen their understanding while honing their professionalism. In my estimation, probably the best form of higher education isn't the grand lecture hall, but rather interactive projects and Oxford-style tutorials.

DL and telecommunications can deliver that to students in remote locations, in non-laboratory and non-hand's-on situations anyway. So this isn't an anti-DL argument.

I'm just saying that recording a bunch of lectures delivered at top-tier universities and then offering them for free online isn't going to be all that revolutionary or game-changing.

It isn't going to be "better than any single university". That's just foolish.

 

May I respectfully disagree Bill? I think the thing that's game-changing about the net is the vast variety of mediums. Books, video, slide-shows, teleconferencing, audio (that you can stick on a cd and play in your car), articles, specialty websites that compile data, combined with usability features like the ability to find data faster. The reason the Internet will be superior to a library is that more mediums are present and that correspondence is more efficient combined with a greater convenience. Forums exist to help us find answers to questions in our text, etc. Books can't be dynamic, the Internet can. As the Internet progresses it will become more "hands on" with the ability to illustrate and animate information in a more complex way. I believe it is easier to get an answer on the Internet most of the time than trying to track down a teacher and ask questions that he/she may or may not know the answer to. Also, often you may not get a well considered answer that may be non-applicable. The Internet allows you to simply ask somebody else when one person fails you. There is no reliance on anybody, the answer is always out there.

Hopefully copyright law will evolve to the point that most books will be readable online as well for a very low fee or even free. That would truly be the icing on the cake. Perhaps Bill Gates "five years" stipulation is addressing that very issue, because as of now, I believe the Internet is the greatest supplier of knowledge, not the university.

Oh! And off-topic, although Bill Gates has made many good predictions here's one bad one:
"640K is more memory than anyone will ever need"

Can you tell I like computers ^-^

 

Gates claims he never said that.

 

Interesting. I believe in the power of the internet, but I also went to a smaller college that was very interactive between students and professors. There is something to be said about feeling like the professor is going to call on you at any moment keeping you feeling motivated. I also had a couple classes in b-school that were primarily directed by a different student group each week. But post-college I have found so many relatively quick tutorial type videos online to be of awesome value, you can have the video bookmarked for easy access in the future for a refresher, something I wouldnt be able to do from a traditional college class.