I'd say that it probably will be, yes, and I've been saying so for some time. Think about it for a moment, we still use the educational techniques of the Early Middle Ages.
I first saw this point at Brad DeLong's place. When books are hand written, extremely expensive (as in, more than a year's wages possibly) then it makes sense for students to gather in one place and listen to the book being read to them.
Thus what we call a lecture. However, once printing has made the book cheap there's really not all that much point to such a gathering. Classes, OK, that's different, they're more interactive. And yes, of course, there's more to college than just the lectures and the education.
However, the internet could radically change how the system works. There are a number of private companies offering courses purely over the net, you can get K-12 tuition in many subjects from India, Stanford, MIT, a number of colleges are placing lectures and so on online for free consumption.
It's certainly possible to get educated for free over the 'net these days. However, that isn't actually enough. You also need to get the certificate, the degree, before anyone will take seriously your new found knowledge. In fact, people will take the certification much more seriously than anything you do or don't know.
Which is why this announcement from MIT is important:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing technology that will allow students taking courses online to use simulated labs, interact with professors and other students, and earn certificates.
"The driver is to reach everyone out there who can't be here," MIT Provost Rafael Reif said on a conference call with reporters on Monday.
MIT is already known for its OpenCourseWare program, which offers some 2,100 courses online for free.
Until now, students worked through MIT course material on their own and were never tested. Beginning in a few months, however, they will be able to see sought-after professors in videos, engage in student discussion groups, and take examinations.
It's those last two words which are so important: "take examinations".
Obviously these things are going to be easier in the humanities and the social sciences than the hard sciences. But it's possible to see how the educational world might change in the coming years. People doing their degrees from home, quite possibly while still working, mixing and matching videos, books, CD Roms. All of which can already be done of course, but now MIT is adding the examination part, the ability to actually gain a full degree through this method.
In fact, a similar system has been running at my Alma Mater for many years now, certainly decades and it might even be a century. The University of London offers external degrees. They used to be done by mail but are now largely done online. Right now you can take a London School of Economics degree in economics, one of the finer institutions and courses in the world, for £4,500. That's not per credit, nor per year, that's for the whole degree course. Call it $7,000 before you start buying books.
If major US institutions like MIT start going down that road then I would expect to see a crumbling of the extant educational order in the next decade or two. Why spend $30,000 to $50,000 a year to go away to school when you can gain the same or better degree at home for $3,000 a year?
I don't guarantee that it will happen over night: there are a rather large number of vested interests, not least the professoriate, who would object to being made redundant in this manner. But if I were starting out now I would be very wary indeed of trying for a teaching career in tertiary education. It's entirely possible that in twenty years time there will be perhaps 10% of the number of positions, jobs, doing that as there are now.
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