The lectures may be online, but he's not getting credit for learning from them.

Have you ever sat in a lecture with a couple hundred other students? It's not like the teaching is the least bit personal, so what does the medium matter at that point?

If the lectures are online and the lecturers are re-deployed to do supervisions and one-one tuition that's great.

If as we all suspect, the whole dept is reduced to an admin person to collect the names and fees and a sys-admin to install the multiple choice problem set software - then that's less good !

Why is that less good? Let the market decide whether it's an effective alternative or not. If somebody can learn just as well from that medium then let them. Eliminating an entire department isn't a bad thing -- education is about the students, not the teachers -- regardless of what the unions would have you believe.

>Let the market decide That's the clever part of MIT/Stanford etc putting all their lectures online.

Whats the point of paying to go to UC when you can learn the same stuff at home? And then the UC diploma becomes worthless because everyone knows you just watched the same stuff as the guy at home.

The only diplomas worth having will be those that still have real lecturers - like MIT and Stanford!

A similar thing happened in the UK 10years ago. All the equivalents of community colleges were renamed universities. This was supported by all the UK's IVY league schools! The problem is that somebody going for a job with a degree from a mid-ranking uni is faced with an employer who isn't sure whether that is a 'real' university or a former college. So to 'play it safe' they only look for IVY league degrees. By pretending to support wider access to education - the top 5 places destroyed neatly all the competition!