I needed the structure and social interaction of the college environment. But oddly enough, it depended on what discipline I was studying. I would not have been able to learn math and physics on my own, and those were my majors. On the other hand, I easily taught myself programming and electronics.

A friend whose daughter got an online degree (while at home with a baby, living in a small rural town with no other options) said that the hardest thing about studying online was the sheer boredom of sitting at a computer all day with no one to interact with.

A particular advantage of going to college for me, was that I learned how to teach by observing my professors in a variety of settings, and imitating their methods. Today, a lot of my work is surprisingly similar to teaching: Presenting ideas to people who are not experts, mentoring younger colleagues, etc.

With programming and electronics, self-study offers the opportunity to make things, both novel and derivative, and immediately (or near enough) see whether or not the function. Similar to setting up an experiment in a physics lab, but again, who has a home physics lab? Programming can be done on a cheap (< $200) laptop. A large portion of electronics can be accessible with a similar investment in (mostly reusable) parts.

For electronic components, "easy to learn" meant things like designing op amps and logic chips that behaved more like their textbook symbolic representations without weird tricks and pitfalls.

In contrast, you can't change electromagnetics just because you want something that's easier to learn. Nature won't approve. Progress has been made towards explaining it better, for instance, today's notation is simpler than what Maxwell had to grapple with. But such progress comes slowly.

In hindsight, I have this conflict of views sort of. If automation goes the ways in which some fear, then physical institutions will provide a place for people to go instead of rioting out in the streets. To build on Salman Khan's thoughts about online education becoming the Aristotle/Plato model while the physical area acts as a place to build projects and so forth.. this could be one way to go [0]. At the same time, I've read a number of books about the atmosphere of campuses pre-1960s. Personally I feel we protest too much these days. So perhaps a focus on online campuses while limiting fewer people to the physical campuses can allow for the protests to die down and perhaps a return to the pre-1960s era. That said, I have my doubt that people are just going to be content sitting at home in mass learning.. so perhaps Salman Khan's ideal will be what emerges. Then again, it would also be ideal that we don't throw out the old way completely. It would be ideal with some smaller liberal arts colleges could be dead set in their ways in just teaching old liberal arts. Ideally without the computer so to encourage actually reading texts in whole and producing critical thinking. This would be the elite probably due to the cost of that education.

My bias yields to the hope that the majority of all jobs are destroyed by automation and that people having nothing else to do but to get phd's in the subject that they are interested in. Perhaps though the access of education will depend on the level of talent and knowledge; for the masses a khan/coursera style approach, for the mid-level an approach that is a hybrid of khan as Plato model and physical interaction for project development. The upper end, the elite would be in person primarily, small classes in cohesive campuses with lack of protests that disturb the open learning environment; of course moocs would be available to these students but the primary purpose would be more old form to develop better critical thinking skills. The moocs, even if PhD programs are developed will suffer the hive mind problems as one can see in say many social media platforms (reddit, facebook, twitter etc).

[0] A Vanity Fair panel discussion with Salman Khan and Reed Hastings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnqaenik93A

edit: added youtube link for reference.

In many universities it does feel like you're basically paying for a very expensive real-life recording of something you could have just watched online. Sure, there are TA office hours, but is waiting in line to talk to a TA for 10 minutes a week worth tens of thousands a year?

IMO we should focus on teaching meta skills as soon as possible, teach people HOW to learn, and then let them be auto-didacts with opportunities to practice their craft and be surrounded by other people struggling to be great at the same skill.

This is obviously not talking about high stakes professions such as surgery, where perhaps the traditional approach is the best we can do until computers can vet our skills.

I can only speak for myself but I would not have been self-disciplined enough to complete the courses that I did during my undergraduate CS degree.

The added bonus was the degree allowed me to emigrate fairly easily.

[1] - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-univer...

> the cost for an equivalent course for a resident of England is £2,786

The OU used to be about giving a chance to education to everybody. This is sad...

It does sadden me to see them struggling with the new fees, I'm not sure I would have done it at the current rates. I certainly wouldn't have taken a loan for it.

(I followed the THES link but didn't find anything about the OU dropout rate at the other end of it.)

Absolutely. Anders Ericcson makes this point very clear in his research and also the book "Peak"

In order to become an expert, you need feedback from other experts. I used to think "well who broke through the field first? who became the first expert?" and to that I say that is how human knowledge works. It's built on top of one another, whether we think about it consciously when trying to learn a new concept in a new field, or we are using it subconsciously in the form of an abstraction.

As an anecdote, my first "real" job after getting my CS degree out of college, I worked at a place for about 2 years. In 1 and a half of those years, I felt like I was barely getting by, not meeting my knowledge goals. Then we decided to get crazy, and try this agile and pair programming thing. I worked under one of the most productive developers we had there at the time for 3 months. 5 years later, I still contest, I learned more in that short 3 months under his guidance than I have in my whole career on my own. I have been searching for that experience again ever since.

But now? I can take an online course taught by people who actually know how to teach. And if I don't understand something, I can rewind and play the lecture over again. Or I can take it a slower pace. Or most importantly, I can go on YouTube and find other teachers who explain a concept differently. It is highly improbable that any single teacher can explain everything perfectly to everyone so it's quite amazing that one can basically go on YouTube for alternative explanations that make more sense to them.

In fact, if you look at highly rated videos on say, math concepts, you'll find plenty of students who leave comments like, "Wow, you explained this better than my teacher did" or "I wish you were my teacher." Students MAY have the capacity for concepts, but the teachers could also be poor at teaching. How many students actively blame themselves for being 'too stupid' or 'bored' and instead give up because they don't feel empowered by their paid teacher to overcome the knowledge gap?

No doubt there's clear advantages in having an innovator or brilliant person guide you in your studies. And certainly if one were to do a Masters or PhD, having an advisor is essential and invaluable. That said, for a lot undergrads / students, I would be surprised if the majority of them had a strong relationship with their professors/teacher.

I believe that online courses and college should exist out there in the world, as there are advantages to both. But I think because the feedback portion of it so dependent on the quality of the teacher, that it's not a guaranteed advantage.

This explains a lot of people I've worked it. "Oh I read a tutorial/watched YouTube videos of it, let me do it".

I've learned that I can't say I understand something unless I can explain it to someone else and apply it to solve a practical problem.

I attended Tealeaf Academy, now LaunchSchool, to kick-start my own self learning, and I thought it was an excellent investment. Their model is (or at least was) to provide a structured program, with email & chat support, and a few hours per week of live interaction. I also liked how they framed learning as the entry point to a path which required a lot of learning, and not a "be an employed developer in 90 days." It worked well for me.

Won't these people just "drop out" early on in their careers anyway? Someone that can't do any self directed study will not last long in almost any IT role.

I'm also curious about how you feel things like /r/learnprogramming, stackoverflow, and stackoverflow IRC can act as surrogates for teachers.

I've learnt to play the guitar online. I did a couple of music related MOOCs. I use YouTube resources like JustinGuitar and Lick'n'Riff. But I still felt like I needed a real teacher and went and got one. Even though this teacher is probably not at the same level of some of the YouTube "gods" :) I still got a lot out of that.

Automated code checkers are definitely useful but, other than that, I'm not sure I've found MOOCs much different from watching YouTube videos. Nothing wrong with that--especially with top-flight lecturers--but they're hardly revolutionary. Videos of lectures have pretty much been a solved problem since VCRs went mainstream.

SO users demand that your question be "correct". Note, I didn't mean that it should be clear what your problem is, it's just that if you ask a "noob question", for an explanation, or if five people think it can't be done, you'll get down voted and closed in a second.

It's sad because other (smaller) SE sites are quite nice.

I completely disagree. I'm an experienced dev from C++ learning Android/Java dev. Literally 90% of what I need is on SO (the rest usually from mkyong), thanks to google some of the answers even bubble up to the search page so I dont even have to click on them. I would be much worse off without SO.

A lot of people on SO seem to be answering just for points, half the time, or more, they don't actually know what they are talking about all or have experience with what they are explaining; they have often literally just "researched" the question and now they condense a couple of sources into an answer. Without having a proper understanding of the subject.

SO is bad for the whole industry. And there is not much that is worse than a "developer" copying an answer off SO and putting it into a production code base, without even understanding the answer they just copied.