Thrun seems to be getting into this mode as well with this line: "He’s thinking big now. He imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them. Thrun just has to plot the right course."

Why is it that people (even apparently faculty like Thrun) seem to forget that universities deliver more than just undergraduate education? "Delivering higher education" also means research labs and centers for scholars, graduate education, professional education, executive education, etc. While undergraduate education may be ripe for disruption, there is a serious leap needed to go from there to the complete disappearance of thousands of institutions.

Just look at the numbers: dederal research grants and endowments will sustain at least several hundred universities for the long-term, and other universities that are currently teaching-focused will move more of their efforts to research as students take online classes and stop being paid customers.

The institutions that should be worried are technical colleges (depending on major), community colleges and perhaps state college systems. They are the most likely to be disrupted, particularly if Udacity could offer a more comprehensive curriculum. But Stanford? Or even schools like the University of Florida or UC-Santa Barbara? They have plenty of other income sources, and still have a lot of life in them.

In your world view, places of higher education and places of advanced research are strongly coupled. This does not need to be the case. Historically some great research labs had nothing to do with education (Bell Labs). I think Thrun's prediction is that there were be great institutions of higher education that have nothing to do with research. I certainly agree with that point.

Of course, all disruptive innovation starts at the bottom of the market. I am sure the first big wins will be giving educational access to talented and bright but poor kids in the developing world. For them, even something like access to a first world university is far from affordable, and the fledgling online classes are much better than the alternative, even if they aren't yet competitive with traditional university education.

I took the online ml-class last semester, and I am now taking the pgm-class this semester. I have or am taking graduate versions of the same classes at a traditional university.

The big discovery (thanks to Sal Khan) is that teaching fundamentally scales. It's a big waste that all over the world, there are hundreds of smart researchers each teaching 10s to hundreds of students basically the same subject. What would be best is to get one great teacher for each of the subjects of those 100s researchers, make him focus really hard (10x the effort he would have put in, but 1/10 the total effort of all of the previous combined effort) to make a ridiculously good online class. Then you have freed up a bunch of time for the researchers, and most of the almost thousands to 10s of thousands of students are actually experiencing a better class.

I think you exemplify the more likely scenario, in my view, of the typical real, down and dirty use-cases for this stuff. That is people that are already undergraduates and graduate students using this as supplementary material either to their current classes or more probably extra-curricular.

I agree. I don't know about computer science students, but as a civil engineering student college means a whole lot more to me than just being lectured at. I'm involved in half a dozen student organizations, and a lot of the time I find myself learning more outside the classroom working with professors and other students on competition teams and organizations than I am in class. It's sad that so many people think watching videos can teach them as much as actually plugging into a real life program with other students and experience faculty to interact with. I think it shows there's something wrong with how most people are approaching college in general.

I agree that what students do outside the classroom is as important, if not more important, than the lectures. However, going through the lectures, in person or through a video, lessens the learning curve for critical skills that are a prerequisite to outside the classroom learning experiences. In other words, these videos give everyone who watches them an opportunity to engage in the next level of learning.

I believe it is possible that with these prerequisites moved outside of universities, it becomes possible for more group learning experiences, not unlike those you experienced with professors and other students, to become available to everyone. Currently, the latter is only available (mostly) to students at a university.

People don't (read: shouldn't) think that all it takes to become a computer scientist or civil engineer is to watch a few videos. They definitely know that they can't without learning the concepts in those videos, allowing themselves to become more involved with real challenges in the field and further their educations.

I agree that there's more to college than just the classes, but why can't we try to get some of this environment to exist outside of a college environment? What's sad to me is that once you leave undergrad, a lot of the things you talk about become closed off to people.