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.
Deseret News – Monday, April 20, 2009:
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Um… way to have relevant pictures for your blog entry. Pig.
So can we dump student aid from the budget, or are they to be subsidized forever?
No we just going start new subsidies for Computers, on-line colleges , virtual high schools and heavily promote majors like “webcam performer”
#1 Stephanie
You are correct, the pictures are irrelevant. The bottom one is wearing underwear.
To get back on topic…
I don’t think higher education classrooms will ever go away. Sure some professions may turn into hobbies and some professionals might just be self taught. Shit I see it all too often in the design industry. Honestly those “self taught” graphic artists are some of the worst I have ever seen. I have seen some good ones, but for the most part you can tell from a mile away.
Another field of study would be medicine. You want to go under the knife of a surgeon who got his degree on one screen and checked his e-mail on the other? Are there some professions and professionals out there who are self made? Sure. as I have said before there are some great self taught designers, programmers, repairmen, scholars, etc. But without institutional education and learning, there will be no benchmark. Expectations would lessen, and industry would suffer.
As for the pictures, please note that SOME people read this blog during their lunch hour. at least leave the NSFW pics until after 5.
6. “Honestly those “self taught” graphic artists are some of the worst I have ever seen.”
I have to agree with this. I’ve lived with plenty of people who could draw, tattoo artists, etc. types. Anyway, I thought this one guy was great. I mean fantastic. Until he finally got his degree. Now he’s fricken fantastic and all of his old stuff looks like amateurish crap.
Just consider how much has changed in the past 10 years. Remember dial-up, 3.5″ diskettes, ASCII based text email, Kodak film.
The change in the next 10 years will be even greater.
The ivy-covered universities won’t be shuttered, but they will face some serious threats to their financial well being. $150,000 for 4 years of a liberal-arts degree is ludicrous.
With the impending Obama hyper-inflation disaster, many of the universities are going to be going the way of the New York Times and the Dodo bird.
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.
Many of today’s students would rather not work hard too. That doesn’t mean we should dumb down the class material.
There is no substitute for the classroom experience, teacher and students interacting and discussing. The teacher can see who’s getting it and who isn’t. Students learn more listening to other people’s perspectives.
Though I have to agree that the pricing of college educations has gotten out of control. People seem to think that price=quality. Or maybe that it doesn’t matter what you learn, as long as you go to a BigName ™ university.
Obviously I’ll get attacked for agreeing with Stephanie, but come on guys every day there are T&A shots on this site, why? The shots above are terrible, the first is a Lolita fetish shot and the second is total porn. This is an interesting article and I work in education and would like to tweet it, I would love to be able to point everyone to the dvorak.org/blog page to give him some new traffic, but how can I without coming off as a sexist pig? Why aren’t there more women in tech… gee I wonder.
>Though I have to agree that the pricing of college educations has gotten out of control.
That’s what happens when someone else is paying the bills. Even worse when the government response to higher prices is to increase funding for student aid.
The only thing getting close to irrelevant at the moment is the pseudo-porn this blog is becoming. Geez. I guess it’s just TOO much of a stretch for some writers of this blog to realize that something more than horny adolescent-style geeks might be reading it.
Yes, by 2020 college in general with be irrelevant. Why? The public school system is producing total illiterates. What’s the point of college for these kids?
More stories and related pictures on schools.
SN,
Clearly there are other readers out there who agree with me. Your poll screams douche bag since you have both choices favoring you, but I bet you thought it was rather clever… and maybe it is based off your IQ.
Once again, I love how this site aims for alienating the female readers.
16. “Clearly there are other readers out there who agree with me.”
Great, start a blog. Apparently, you already have a solid support base.
“Your poll screams douche bag since you have both choices favoring you”
It’s my poll, so of course if favors me. And because it’s apparant you don’t get it, I’ll explain it to you. My poll was nothing more than a joke. So it doesn’t really matter which side is favored.
“Once again, I love how this site aims for alienating the female readers.”
Take this up with john, it’s his site, But he’s one of the worst offenders. Check out the picture he used for this posting! Even I wouldn’t have used that one considering the seriousness of the story.
@Stephanie
Try eBay … you should buy a sense of humor.
I could certainly see a time where the traditional “lecture hall” could be replaced by a virtual one, but not in what we see today.
I could see a single instructor/professor/lecturer presenting on a modified whiteboard in front of multiple classrooms using that Cisco Telepresence product. That would allow students to see their instructor in “full-size” at the podium while sitting at their desk, if they chose. Or even from their home computer with web-cam so the teacher could see a wall of students from his/her perspective to call upon them, and see them interacting with the teacher, which is the most important part of learning: interaction. That modified whiteboard could instantly be put into students computer notes, so they aren’t just copying, unless they want.
Now the hook is that there would be a lower need of teachers, and the number of students per class could/should still be limited because of the interaction need cited above.
One of my professors actually used a “feedback” device at each station to see how well each student was understanding the material. It could do simple responses like answering A-F for spontaneous questions throughout the lecture. Why couldn’t this same idea be incorporated with things like on several online webinars I’ve been to where you could see a set of squares representing each attendee and those squares were color coded based on their comfort level and/or question to be answered.
Technologies like these would easily allow for the “traditional” classroom to still be felt and experienced. You’d still be stuck with being in class on time, but that may just be your living room computer and not the lecture hall across campus today.
“Just because you can do something does not mean you should do it.”
Online courses may work for some situations (single parents, home-bound students, etc) but it’s still a compromise. Just think of all the cool equipment that one comes in contact with in any college science course. Now kiss it goodbye as you virtually manipulate your test tubes to learn about things like chemical equilibrium. Who is going to become passionate about natural science by looking at a computer screen?
Where will these online college students live, with their parents? Boring! Even if the online student moves out of the nest, attending class online would severely limit social and cultural opportunities that define the college experience. Such things include having fun, making friends, drinking with friends, getting in trouble, getting laid, and sometimes finding the love of one’s life (on the down side: fights, alcohol poisoning, getting arrested, heartbreak, pregnancy, and STDs).
Life is a risk, and if the physical campus disappeared, it would be one more way that the world is made more sterile. We need people who are doers, and if you can’t be bothered to get out of your pajamas to go and live your life when you are college age, you never will.
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?