Will the Internet Replace Universities?

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Will the Internet Replace Universities? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine:

Via Brad DeLong, an arti­cle by Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts with the obvi­ous — the Internet is killing news­pa­pers as we knew them — and asks whether the same will hap­pen to universities.

Kevin Carey, in the orig­i­nal arti­cle cited above, writes:

Newspapers are dying. Are uni­ver­si­ties next? The par­al­lels between them are closer than they appear. Both indus­tries are in the busi­ness of cre­at­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing infor­ma­tion. Paradoxically, both are threat­ened by the way tech­nol­ogy has made that eas­ier than ever before.

Cosmic Variance points out the vari­ety of func­tions avail­able through more tra­di­tional uni­ver­sity envi­ron­ments, from belong­ing to a com­mu­nity, to par­tic­i­pat­ing in extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties and becom­ing inde­pen­dent. He sug­gests strongly that it would be “too bad” if cur­rent instruc­tion were to be replaced by an online model, much as the Internet has sup­planted print newspapers.

Reader com­ments have inter­est­ing per­spec­tives on the mat­ter, too. Personally, I am inclined to agree that an online, Web-based edu­ca­tion would have pro­vided per­haps twenty per­cent of what I learned dur­ing my under­grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion, and per­haps fifty per­cent or more of my law school edu­ca­tion. Law school has sim­ple been so much more fact-specific and detailed in its teach­ing in a way that my under­grad­u­ate learn­ing was not. On the other hand, noth­ing could replace my judi­cial extern­ship expe­ri­ence or cer­tain inter­ac­tions with some fac­ulty in law school. But this in-person, expe­ri­en­tial aspect was far more crit­i­cal for me as an under­grad­u­ate, where learn­ing facts was far less impor­tant than learn­ing to think crit­i­cal, engage with the world on my own, and seek out my own path dis­tinct from what I thought I should be doing with my life. All achiev­able inde­pen­dent of a phys­i­cal uni­ver­sity, I would think, but per­haps more dif­fi­cult and less likely to occur as effectively.

Regardless, I do not think the phys­i­cal uni­ver­sity is going any­where, but I do think online options are, will be, and ought to be crit­i­cal sup­ple­ments, par­tic­u­larly in cer­tain areas of learning.