http://polymathprojects.org/

I’m not sure it has been wildly successful yet, but we are still at the early stages.

And I would certainly participate in such a project if I found one that was a good match for my research interests. And I hope I will one day.

Has there been attempts at authoring a paper using something like a wiki, or is that maybe going too far?

Regardless, I’m all for this experiment.

That’s a good point.

But I think that it is not a problem if you are the primary author of the paper in question and you are willing to share the credit.

But, yeah, I expect to have to think this through some more as I do it.

W.r.t. to plagiarism: I don’t think direct plagiarism will be a problem, as it is will be obvious that the ideas were published here first. There’s no problem with arXiv pre-prints either. Besides, the readers of this blog are your witnesses

In my comment, I mentioned another good place to find free ebooks: Random House’s Suvudu.com. They release a couple of titles each month, DRM-free, for a limited time.

Thanks for the recommendations!

Universities move slowly. That’s in their nature. I don’t expect anything quick to happen.

Second, Laval University offering an online CS degree strikes me as paralleling the news industry’s relationship with the Internet. Newspapers put content online for free, hoping for big advertising dollars and figuring anything was better than nothing from people who otherwise wouldn’t have read the publication. The first ones out probably did well. Then when everyone arrived margins shrunk, and suddenly it wasn’t just attracting new readers, but pulling away existing subscribers to the higher margin, more established products. Now we’re seeing the start of the backlash against free online news as media corporations pull their content behind paywalls. It’s not exactly parallel, particularly in that online degrees aren’t free, but they should result in lower margins than housing students locally. Just as free, online high quality news seemed inevitable online before there was a sudden a fight against it, we may be in the optimisitic phase of online learning, before it grows common enough to threathen the existing model.

As you say, none of us can predict the future, but I could see one where the bogeyman of online degree mills is trotted out as a reason we need to differentiate between online and traditional degrees. “I talked regularly with leading thinkers in my field, why should I get the same piece of paper as someone across the world who just watched youtube videos?” the talking point would go. Philisophically, I agree with you that online learning could lead to a better education system. I just have my doubts about whether it’ll happen in a meaningful way in the near term. If society starts to look at online degrees as inferior, that’ll start costing those students jobs, and the smart money will be on offline learning, whether or not its better.

But you have to watch out because there will always be people insisting that classroom lecture is the absolute best thing. And within their frame of mind, they are right too.

So “better quality” is something you need to qualify.

I’m suggesting that there is a difference in quality between a course whose contact-hours consisting primarily of information-transmission (i.e. lecturing in-person or online, real-time or time shifted; the medium is irrelevant) and a course whose contact-hours consist of interaction, coaching, and collaboration. Not only is there a difference, but this difference is important to providing students with authentic and useful learning experiences. I am putting this forward as a preferred future, the one we should be working towards specifically because it would do a superior job of achieving the goals of higher education.

Given your comments of the difference in quality between books produced by scribes and books produced by printing presses, I believe you are talking about something else, about the difference between physically sitting in a lecture hall watching someone talk and sitting somewhere else at some other time in front of a screen watching someone talk.

Putting aside the question of whether a recording of someone talking is the best way to transmit the information to students, I would agree that making these recordings available online is a good way to scale the information, and furthermore it has several advantages over the in-class lecture. Students have the additional flexibility of viewing the lecture when and where they want. They can also review the lecture in whole or in part, based on their own learning needs.

Your comments suggest that you believe that universities do not have learning as their goal, but rather that they are primarily motivated by generating revenue. While there is plenty of evidence to support this idea, I think it oversimplifies reality. I see this more as a case of university administrators struggling to meet a diverse set of requirements within set of constraints. In order to make their lives easier, there will be pressure to redefine what is meant by ‘learning’, to reduce it to something less then it should be. The future you are suggesting here fits that bill, which is why it wouldn’t surprise me to see it gaining traction in the halls of academe.

I have already started to see pressures from university administration to move courses online, so I agree with you in that this isn’t a hypothetical situation: it is happening now. What I’m arguing for is that we should be very careful to not bake the dated teaching practices of the past into our learning systems of the future. We have an opportunity to use information technology to radically improve the student learning experience. I’m hoping we make the most of it!

–Ed