Last fall, David Wiley stood in front of a room full of professors and university administrators and delivered a prediction that made them squirm: “Your institutions will be irrelevant by 2020.”
Wiley is one part Nostradamus and nine parts revolutionary, an educational evangelist who preaches about a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free.
Institutions that don’t adapt, he says, risk losing students to institutions that do. The warning applies to community colleges and ivy-covered universities, says Wiley, who is a professor of psychology and instructional technology at Brigham Young University.
America’s colleges and universities, says Wiley, have been acting as if what they offer — access to educational materials, a venue for socializing, the awarding of a credential — can’t be obtained anywhere else. By and large, campus-based universities haven’t been innovative, he says, because they’ve been a monopoly.
But Google, Facebook, free online access to university lectures, after-hours institutions such as the University of Phoenix, and virtual institutions such as Western Governors University have changed that. Many of today’s students, he says, aren’t satisfied with the old model that expects them to go to a lecture hall at a prescribed time and sit still while a professor talks for an hour.
He says that universities will be irrelevant by 2020 – then says students will listen to lectures on iPods.
I think by 2020 iPods will be irrelevant – replaced by whatever technology comes next.
As for universities – most are irrelevant right now. My degree from 1990 got me a job. Since then I’ve had to continuously retrain to keep up-to-date. What’s the point of 4/5 years to get a degree if you must keep retraining for the rest of your life?
21. “I think by 2020 iPods will be irrelevant – replaced by whatever technology comes next.”
Best comment so far!
SN,
Maybe you should start YOUR OWN blog instead of participating in this frat boy mentality that if the blog owner does it, you should too!
Improbus,
I have never been accused of not having a good sense of humor. The pictures aren’t funny. Maybe you are some kind of weirdo that laughs when looking at soft-core porn?
And what a horrible comeback you had. Here is another horrible one for you: You should go to the bank and get a reality check!
“Maybe you should start YOUR OWN blog instead of participating in this frat boy mentality”
That makes no sense. I’m already blogging here and John’s site gets pretty good numbers.
that if the blog owner does it, you should too!
And I never said I do it because John does it. I merely pointed out that if you have a problem with it, talk to John, not me. To tell the truth, before I was a contributing editor I used to bitch about the pictures too. Now I find it hilarious to get people like you riled up.
“I have never been accused of not having a good sense of humor.”
If you had a sense of humor, instead of bitching about my totally biased poll, you would have created your own poll and continued the joke. That fact that you didn’t is bad enough. But that you didn’t even see that my poll was a joke is really bad.
If all public schools were as well run as Deerfield Academy, kids today wouldn’t be dumb:
http://deerfield.edu/index.cfm
Of course, to get into DA you have to be a brain.
@Stephanie
If I had any feelings I am sure you would have hurt them. Good job.
New media will complement traditional teaching methods, not supplant them.
Lectures are the most ineffective way to learn anything, at least from what we know about learning and short to long term memory conversion. By the time students get done with classes and move on to homework and study, it’s no longer review, it’s for all intents an purposes new material.
With a little searching I was able to find the girl in that second picture and the original of that image. It’s from a porn site for a girl called Jordan Capri. Not that it matters in the least.
#28 prh
Damn good information. I just hope Stephanie stopped reading this thread.
Way to keep the boy’s club mentality alive…
When I started grad school in 2000 there was some orientation thing where a guy said this same thing so this isn’t a new idea by any means.
The big lecture hall classes can go away. They are mostly useless anyway. As an undergrad I skipped most of them and still got As and Bs because they were general ed. requirements that were easier than the classes I had in high school (my small high school didn’t have AP classes so I couldn’t test out of them).
Smaller upper level classes will still be better in person because a lot of the important stuff isn’t learned from the books but from talking about the issues from the fellow students.
Also, some classes aren’t suited for self learning or online classes. I “taught” some online public speaking classes and they were horrible. I can’t imagine the students learned anything and I couldn’t do anything other than grade and answer questions because my state requires that all the online public speaking classes are exactly the same.
Online lectures may be OK for math, literature , business and journalism majors but for hands-on, practical stuff like medicine, forestry, geology, etc., VR will still have to go a loong way from what 2020 will be able to offer, I think. I remember reading in 80`s Reader’s Digests how in 2000 we would all be watching holo-tv and stuff like that, none of which looks viable in the next five years. And now we are nearing 2010 and still no convincing, commercially available 3D screens anywhere. I guess we can add 20 years to that guy’s prediction, and say that by 2040-50 that will maybe be starting to come true.
I’m a Professor in higher ed, and I’ve thought the same thing for a long time. It’s not a great model. Now students bring laptops to the classroom and read the wikipedia entries on topics along with the lecture (or more likely fiddle with facebook). We have settled on a teaching style that was invented thousands of years ago and have mostly ignored the revolution in mechanisms for conveying information in traditional classroom teaching. Where are all our vaunted schools of education’s research into the best methods for teaching students? Oh right, vested interest in the status quo there. It will change, and the groups that figure out improved methods will profit handsomely. I feel sorry for today’s students. What a waste of 20+ years listening to poorly trained “teachers” drone on..Bueller?
I heard somewhere that colleges were carrying way too many post grads on their budget. Eating up the student tuitions. Or wasting all the government grant money on bloated staff. Colleges aren’t being run like an efficient business. Because they don’t have to. And as long as they control what can be accredited as a degree in something. They’re not likely to be replaced by an online or virtual college. It’s not like newspapers, being replaced by blogs or online sources. And as long as there’s a certain snob value, to attending college, they’re not likely to go away. In fact I’ve wondered why they haven’t built more colleges, to handle the population increase? But obviously, with US jobs being outsourced and foreign visaed workers replacing american grads. The demand for college training must be falling off, as an impractical luxury indulgence.
“In fact I’ve wondered why they haven’t built more colleges, to handle the population increase?”
Well on one hand they have but they are extensions of the larger colleges or community colleges. On the other hand the existing colleges have just gotten bigger.
Once again, SN’s choice of pix is designed to keep actual women far away from Dvorak Uncensored.
Real women must scare the hell out of this kid.
ah you crazy angry people, if it was a man holding his pants tight you’d be saying otherwise, sure love double standards..
I was searching on google for worldwide college and study abroad guide for international students and i found a great website
http://www.education-guide.net. It has all the information needed by the new comers.
So i strongly recommend to check that website and leave your feedback.
Thanks
yes… come to class
no… cannot come to class.
yes-no coming to class
digital classes can reach billions.
microsoft windows used by a billion people.
one OS used by a billion people.
one college can be access by a billion people.