Bill Gates: In five years the best education will come from the web — from TechCrunch.com by MG Siegler
Bill Gates
thinks something is going to die too.
No, it’s not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte — instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners.
“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.
But his overall point is that it’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today.
From DSC:
One could argue that Bill’s background is very different than most people…and that would be true. One could also argue that such a view is an exaggeration of what may actually occur — and you’d probably be right again.
However, such arguments miss the point. We are in a game-changing environment and planning now for the major disruptions already underway is a wise move. There is a perfect storm that has been forming — with trends/pressures from the worlds of technology, economics/business, education, demography, sociology, and more — that won’t be disappearing any time soon.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds’ article from yesterday is worth checking out for some practical advice here.