Udacity

Posted by: stak
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Posted on: 2012-07-07 12:40:36

There's been a lot of press lately about Udacity lately, and how it provides a Stanford-quality education to everybody for free. It doesn't. I think it's great that the course material and lectures are available for free online to anybody who wants it, but I also think most of what you learn in university is learned outside of classrooms.

People who replace a conventional university education with an online education thing like Udacity may well learn all the course material (and maybe even do better on standardized testing of that material) but I have no doubt that they will end up losing something in the bargain. Good universities provide opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas and people in a way that's much harder to replicate online, and in my opinion losing that is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's not an easy thing to measure though, so it won't even be obvious that it's gone until many years from now :(

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