Why wasn't he asking this question when textbooks started to be published? Just give all the physics students Feynmann's Lectures on Physics and a few other textbooks and they can educate themselves. Hire a professor to handle the occasional question.
Does the existence of online video make this so much more compelling?
Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know.
I do know that I enjoyed hanging around in the CmptSci common room and I learned a lot just shooting the breeze with students, TAs and the occasional prof. I would never have learned as much in a chatroom nor would I want to hang around in a chatroom. There are so many modes of communication that are not possible with the chatroom and you don't have the opportunity to bump into random, interesting people.
> Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know.
Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.
1. One argument is that we already have franchised them: universities have access to textbooks of a higher-quality than they previously had. I'm sure we have more universities per capita than before the printing press... (though I haven't the stats).
2. You can set up a course today based on MIT resources. You have a professor (of lower quality), you have classmates (of lower quality). But the point about these things is that they still are greatly beneficial for learning, even if they aren't the greatest in the world.
3. McUniversity. The aforementioned trademark ("insignia of origin") aspect of a top uni: "Oh, you went to MIT?" etc. Franchising it dilutes it into a McUniversity (appropriately).
4. Facetime doesn't scale. Sure you can distribute face-time of a high-quality professor geographically with web-video etc, but such professors don't have enough time for all their students already.
But... an interesting concept... and surely there are aspects that do scale well, and can be franchised better than before due to today's tech... and therein lies a startup.
An aside: Is it just me or are the typical graphics heavy books not nearly as good as the publishers and teachers think they are? It looks like they did a lot of research about how to best layout and setup a course in a book but the result is like a very sterile guide that pushes education down your throat. All the side notes reiterating facts. I much prefer Wikipedia's "state it and leave it" style approach. If something strikes you as important you've already pulled it out in your mind without having the publisher to highlight it in a bubble with graphics.
It looks like they did a lot of research about how to best layout and setup a course in a book
It looks to me like they try to cram as much stuff-that-looks-like-content in as possible so they can justify charging $100+ for the book. The disease is particularly bad at the first-year level where the publishers need to compete against dozens of other damn-near-identical textbooks; this is why every first-year physics textbook I know weighs half a ton and has lots of pretty pictures, whereas the actual content could probably be whittled down to a hundred pages or so.
Just to expand on this a bit. It reminds me of the distinction Papert makes (e.g., Mindstorms or essays (http://www.papert.org/works.html)) between his vision of how computers could empower education and how they are currently being used.
Instead of becoming a new medium, the computer, for the most part, is used as a facilitator of conventional ways of teaching - it's a better typewriter, a better book, a better way to watch a lecture.
Does the existence of online video make this so much more compelling?