Speak­ing at the Techon­o­my con­fer­ence in Lake Tahoe last week, Bill Gates argued that the cost of col­lege needs to come down, and the only way to accom­plish this is through tech­nol­o­gy and less­en­ing the impor­tance of “place-based” col­leges. That’s how you keep col­lege edu­ca­tion open to all. Dur­ing the talk, he went fur­ther and assert­ed, “Five years from now, on the Web for free, you’ll be able to find the best lec­tures in the world. It will be bet­ter than any sin­gle uni­ver­si­ty.”

To be sure, I don’t dis­pute this par­tic­u­lar point. You can already find hun­dreds of free cours­es online, and that’s part of our rea­son for being. But, as I have fre­quent­ly remind­ed peo­ple, lis­ten­ing to lec­tures does­n’t mean you’re get­ting a round­ed edu­ca­tion. Lec­tures inform you. They’re great in that way. But you get an edu­ca­tion when you cou­ple lec­tures with read­ings, when you chew over ideas in a dis­cus­sion sec­tion, when you ana­lyze the lec­tures and read­ings in crit­i­cal papers, when you take exams that force you to syn­the­size every­thing you’ve learned dur­ing the entire semes­ter, etc. Right now, it is very hard to accom­plish this online. On a rel­a­tive basis, e‑learning tools have evolved strik­ing­ly slow­ly dur­ing the past decade. The wide­ly deployed tools are often still klunky and rudi­men­ta­ry. And it still takes con­sid­er­able time, mon­ey and labor to pro­duce a tru­ly excel­lent online course. (At least that’s what I have found dur­ing my ten years in the space.) Will we make progress here? Yes. Would I wel­come it? Of course. But will we offer a sub­stan­tive and high­ly scal­able online alter­na­tive in five years? Very doubt­ful, unless a cat­a­lyst comes along who can dra­mat­i­cal­ly sweep away the exist­ing major play­ers (who just bog things down) and intro­duce some seri­ous inno­va­tion. Mr. Gates, are you that cat­a­lyst?

via Wired Cam­pus