If successful, perhaps other free-agent professors will follow, and once a sufficient number of competently taught, enjoyable, entertaining, college courses are provided for free, this could begin to break the de facto price fixing of the American post-secondary education cartel in league with their accrediting institutions. With the aid of Margaret Spellings, this college cartel has finally become vulnerable to the demands of the market place. Parents may soon finally compare educational products based on quantifiable outcomes, and buy a degree based on highest quality for lowest price. Google can easily deliver what the non-profits have so far refused to: the best education at the best price. Institutions, without the requisite faculty, like Google, Amazon or any various libraries and book stores, certainly could easily provide competently taught, college credit quality, courses on platforms like YouTube.
Google’s purchase of YouTube, combined with the demands of out-priced parents and the pressure of the US Department of Education that post-secondary education finally provide quantifiable results, all coming together within in the last six months, shouts loud that the time for Professors Without Borders has arrived. I know for a fact that there are many many highly educated, highly competent, PhD, University and College faculty willing to work as free-agent professors for advanced education. I also know by hiring free-agent professors, Google would be capable of offering vastly more enjoyable, higher quality and less expensive college degrees than are currently available at other colleges and universities existing on line or in brick and mortar. With large enough numbers of students and high enough quality of professors’ lectures and the stellar name of Google to kick this off, the era of the ten dollar, accredited, 3-credit, college class is here. This after all is the real payoff of the computer age. Over a few tens of years those rare monster computers have now been reduced to a wallet-sized commonplace, the same should be so for the four-year degree, and Google can do it, Google should do it: a Harvard-quality undergraduate education on an iPod, while sipping espresso.
It is entirely conceivable that libraries, book stores and coffee houses could offer degrees of their own using the lectures purchased and digitized by Google. Grading could easily be out-sourced inexpensively, done by professional graders in Bangalore or Beijing. After all, as Thomas Friedman made clear, the world really is flatter than we like to imagine. (Where do you think H&R Block sends overflow tax forms, Kansas? Not really.) Outsourcing grading to third party graders in Asia, would have the additional benefit of helping to eliminate grade inflation, since graders would have no professional incentive to please students with padded grades in order to keep their jobs.
Article comments
1 - Raoul
That's a very interesting idea, Dr. Carmine! :-) I see some negative implications though. For example, you're undermining the very educational fabric of higher education. If this goes through, it's going to lead to job loss. What are we going to do with all those out-of-work professors? While I agree that the cost of higher ed is ridiculously inflated, it does create and maintain jobs, and that's important too, for the health of the economy and the country as a whole. How would you propose to solve this?
2 - Sean
check out MIT opencourseware as well as Connexions.
These are some existing projects you can look to and i am prety sure you can contribute to Conexions yourself if so inclined
3 - Daganev
This looks very nice. New ideas always cause some people to lose jobs, don't think that should be an issue. HOWEVER... I searched YouTube and can't find any of your videos... where are they? Where is a sampler?
4 - Christopher Rose
Brilliant idea! I hope you can make it happen.
5 - Alan
Hello Doc. As one who missed the education boat many years ago, I have been doing just as you suggest since discovering the internet. What I have learned over the past few years has been amazing. If Google had been around when I graduated high school in 1980, I think I would have been a Physicist instead of a truck driver. If you ever need a subject to test your idea on, I would gladly volunteer..............Alan
6 - Jon
Raoul--
Although it may result in some structural unemployment, this is no serious deterrent. This is a fundamental truth of capitalism. If one can not produce something as efficiently as another we don't keep the less efficient producer employed out of sympathy. If you must, it is actually cheaper to go with the more efficient method and subsidize the less efficient producer (laid off professors) until they find a job they can perform better at.
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As far as the idea goes, I think it is great except that there is something more to education than listening to lectures : I learned a great deal by interacting with other students on campus. I have often thought something along these lines to subsidize class room learning would be awesome, but to replace classroom learning altogether seems a bit extreme. I don't think for a minute I could have learned the same by visiting OpenCourseWare...
Maybe the idea can be extended in some way to account for this very serious limitation...
Thoughts?
-Jon
7 - College Student
If the lectures were accompanied by some sort of support system like a message board where people could ask questions and get timely answers that would probably work.. Many college students find spouses in college that would change the entire game..
8 - Julian Morrison
Second Life or similar "massively multi-player" virtual world may be a good forum for tutorials.
9 - ravehanker
If someone really starts a university like that, I'm ready to do my under-grad in engineering all over again
10 - Mert Nuhoglu
I hope to see this happen very much. Universities in general are far behind than they ought to be. A universal, cheap and open university backed by a profitable business model will certainly bring some progress to the area.
11 - Joe
You are making the common mistake of assuming that Universities are in the business of education when, in fact, they are in the business of accreditation.
12 - Sean McDuffee
Going back to the Second Life idea. You could build virtual rooms with tables, chairs, whitebords, everything. You would actually control a person that could walk around and interact with everything in the room. Sound could be worked in so that people talking to each other 10 feet away sound like 10 feet away. You see an open chair, sit down, and start talking and working with each other right there, like a real recitation/study session. There could be public places organized by the site and users/students could create their own. People with the proper material background could TA these rooms. Personally though I think that grading and a system to promote academic honesty are necessary for any accreditation of such an online world.
Sean
13 - Daganev
Second life is evil, overrated, and much to hyped up.
There is only one industry that is working in Second life, and its not exactly pg-13.
But I'm still waiting for the YouTube videos.
14 - martin
I regards to what you wrote. It trully will come to that in the near future and google will be on the forfront of it all.
15 - Josh Nunn
I'd sign up at Google U, the first truly global university. I could attend tutorials with Google Talk and collaborate on assessments with other students on Docs and Spreadsheets - students from all around the world! And the people you meet and work with will actually want to be there!
Second life might work - but why set it up as a classroom? Why not use the flexible reality to demonstrate the issues you're learning about? There are already islands where people are demonstrating what it's like to have paranoid schizophrenia, how useful to people learning about psychology?! You could teach maths in worlds whose physics correspond to the type of math!
I want in!
16 - Rosie Perera
Outsourcing the grading to Asia? Yikes! That might be fine for a math or physics class where there are right and wrong answers, and some hack could just check students' assignments against an answer sheet. But one of the advantages of taking a class from a professor instead of watching lectures on YouTube is that you get feedback on your papers from someone who knows you and desires to coach you to become better at what you're learning. Grading papers is one way of doing that. Granted, not all professors are that great at reading and marking up papers -- most don't have time to do a really thorough job of it. But that is something I've treasured from some of my best professors which I wouldn't give up for all the convenience in the world.
Being able to ask questions and get more personal instruction during office hours is another thing that would be lost with YouTube courses.