For the majority of university students the learning process is largely composed of sitting in large lecture halls with minimal interactions being lectured by someone who'd much rather be doing research than teaching.

Why precisely is that superior to a video of a lecture delivered by someone who's focus is teaching ?

*whose (i'm so sorry (for being off-topic))

Have you ever taken a MOOC? A quality one, like Andew Ng's Machine Learning, or Data Analysis and Statistical Inference from Duke.

I did Andrew Ng's machine learning MOOC course.

It was very good for a MOOC, and better than my worst university classes, but I'm hesitant to say it was even as good as an average university course.

I don't think my education would have been as good entirely composed of such classes, but I'm willing to admit some of that might be preference, educational style I was raised with, etc. However, it seemed much lighter and less demanding than Id expect from an actual university ML class.

Some of them are good. But I doubt people will look back on their MOOC-taking years with quite the same level of nostalgia and camaraderie as their college years...

Not that I see that as a big problem, but - as long as the social component is strong enough, I don't see why not. I sometimes get nostalgic for the times I played e-sports competitively (Battlefield 2).

Tertiary education is already a commodity -- the process by which that commodity is attained is simply becoming more efficient.

McDonalds isn't merely a more "efficient" burger, and that's the point here.

Cutting substance in favor of cutting price (or being "efficient") has been a disaster in American culture -- from food to education.

What key substance of education is being cut with a MOOC? And how can we minimize it?

Interactive lessons and Socratic style teaching, for starters. My best courses were all relatively small (10-20 people) and based around guided discovery. Technology could replicate some of that, but there are two problems for scaling -- it requires an interactive teacher that can respond not only to right answers, but wrong ones, and the group size cannot become too large. So you could do it online, but the 'M' in MOOC gets in the way.

Then there's the less class focused aspects -- office hours, homework groups, meeting classmates, etc. Some of this is replicated online, bit it would take dozens of emails or forum posts to replicate 30 minutes of one-on-one discussion with a professor (or even classmate). Much of the value in my education came out of study sessions and being exposed to other people's understandings and interpretations and needing to learn to explain my own. Small study groups using online collaboration tools (eg, voip and whiteboard apps) help with that, but MOOCs don't have the same tendancy to encourage that interaction that real classes do (and I'm not sure I buy online is the same as in person -- and I say that having worked remote before).

I went to an engineering school that had a very difficult time with their drop out rate. One of the biggest indicators of success, meaning graduation, was the students incoming math ability. Basically, if the student came in and took anything less than calculus when they first arrived, it was more likely than not that they'd drop out. Eventually, the math department added mandatory attendance to all lower level math courses and the affect was dramatic. The graduation rate went way up for these students.

Now, graduation rate is only one possible metric. That said, many universities do have hard data and that data generally states that classroom attendance leads to better outcomes overall. Certainly, that doesn't work for all students, but it does suggest that there still is a tangible, substantial difference between being in class and not.

Those "horrific training videos" are usually made to comply with some regulatory or insurance requirement, as opposed to being actual training.

In this issue of the economist they indicate that most of the people who are using MooCs are are already working and using them to increase their skills. While the people marketing MooCs may pitch it as a replacement for school, I don't think that's the reality for most people.

Consequently I would suggest thinking of the "credentials problem" as how you demonstrate a new skill to an employer - I the answer may be not be a certificate at all, e.g. maybe a portfolio site, side project, etc.

Can you offer any actual _evidence_ that makes this "disgusting", or even a bad thing? I have a hard time believing that making any sort of education free is bad -- let alone disgusting.