Digital Disruption

Those of you who are sitting in Starbucks with your laptops writing your thesis statements for your English 101 paper due next Friday understand this. You, who are lounging comfortably on your sofa participating in an online discussion board for Sociology of Sports, get it. You already attend the college of anywhere and love it.

Online education has skyrocketed and educators have been tossing around the concept of using the Internet to come up with a business framework where online classes would be rated similar to consumer products and tuition costs would be determined by auction houses. Of course, traditional campuses are still in the mix and are not lacking in students who want to attend universities in person.

However, Stanford University has been shaken by a couple of developments which could revolutionize college education in new ways. NYC’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to build a Stanford campus in Silicon Valley, New York. The ideology behind this proposal is that Stanford University can embed itself within already established businesses and augment the city’s local economic sector.

Interestingly enough, Sebastian Thrun, an innovative professor at Stanford University has a vision of online education for the future that is even more fantastic. His class entitled “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” is already offered for free online and over 130,000 have enrolled for the course.  Incredible? Yes, but shocking, according to Thrun’s philosophy of education, no. Thrun is determined to create a virtual college that isn’t constructed upon the theory of exclusivity with some students unable to attend due to the high costs.

Thrun knows that in order to make his vision a reality he will need to overcome some hurdles such as how to keep track of who is attending class or cheating and will this extreme form of online education hold students’ interests. However, the idea of online education made affordable for the masses is revolutionary and online professors could reach thousands of students this way with the assistance of online teaching assistants.

Thrun states that, if his dream can be made a reality, “it will disrupt all of higher education.” He could be right. Think about it. It could be a tsunami for most of the universities and colleges that are dependent upon student enrollment as their primary income. Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, is supportive of Thrun’s experiment with digital education but, instead of seeing Thrun’s online education as encompassing every subject and major, he views it as a reality for certain specialization programs.

Regardless of whether or not, Thrun is successful with his goal to completely overhaul college education as we know it, one thing is certain. Universities are heading into uncharted technological territories and, while traditional education may not be completely replaced, the university system will be experiencing creative and new strategies for making coursework available and affordable to more students.