Playing devli's advocate so are Colleges are those also doomed?
Looking at this article makes me think of what if we made a course an open platform. Maybe take moodle or some other system and merge it with a wiki and create courses with it. Might be interesting.
I don't think that analogy holds up well. For newspapers -- an AP article on the New York Times website has the same value as an AP article on any other website. More broadly speaking -- the content is what's valuable here, and if you offer the same content, you offer the same value to readers.
As the author himself notes:
"What colleges do not do, at least on campus, is to make money off course content. As it is, you can easily order all the textbooks you could possibly read on Amazon. You can join discussion groups about them. You sneak into lectures, or find tons of them online. There is simply little value in the course content."
And yet, the vast majority of people are paying for this content, rather than applying the author's cost-saving measures. Why? Because there IS little value in the course content. But that's NOT what colleges are selling. They're selling credentials. In this case, getting the content from Harvard IS different from getting it off a Github repository. Why? Because there's a mechanism at Harvard that signals to other people what kind of content you have learned from them. The reason that the analogy to newspapers isn't a perfect one is because accreditation solves real problems for consumers of college -- it lets them demonstrate that their credential has value.
Paywalls are "bad" because they restrict sharing of content. For news articles, that's bad. People want to be able to share articles they find interesting -- on Facebook, on Twitter, on Hacker News and Reddit and via e-mail and so on and so forth. Paywalls reduce the number of people I can discuss content with, and thus reduce the value of an article to me. With credentials, you don't have that effect -- a credential is MORE valuable to me the harder it is to obtain, because the credential then gives off a stronger signal that I have demonstrated my worth.
Now, MOOCs target a wider audience than the people looking for credentials. But their revenue streams almost all come from credentialing. And so I don't think that closing a MOOC has the same effect as putting newspaper content behind a paywall.
I think it's wrong to posit that colleges are selling credentials. When you enroll at any college, what you're actually paying for is the content of the courses that you'll take for the duration of your enrollment. In other words, you're paying for the quality of the education that you'll receive.
So no, real colleges are not selling credentials. Sure, you can buy a degree online, if you know where to look, but that only gets you a useless certificate.
> In other words, you're paying for the quality of the education that you'll receive.
Sort of, ish. There'd be a lot fewer people going to uni for the abstract concept of "education", especially at what it costs in the US - the reason that many people go to uni is that you can prove that you've been educated under such-and-such a standard to future employers. That's credentials, and that's what people are looking for from a college.
You can't do anything without credentials. You can't just apply to a job and say "yeah, I know it all," when everybody else who 'knows it all' has a degree backing them up. It puts you at a severe disadvantage.
If the purpose of college is signaling, then that purpose is not achieved by a MOOC at all.
Also, colleges have a lot of other societal value (like research) so I certainly hope they can still get funded.
A reasonable model is that they sell certifications in hard work, perseverance, and maybe intelligence to students and employers so that they can fund scientific advancement. They also sell "meeting peers who might be cofounders", "social experience of living closely with lots of young attractive people", and a number of other similar things.
Classroom learning is only a fraction of the residential college experience that people pay for. Ask any university alum at their ten-year reunion what they remember most fondly about college, what shaped their lives the most, and what was most influential for turning them into who they are today ... chances are, nobody is going to mention the classes they took :)
Looking at this article makes me think of what if we made a course an open platform. Maybe take moodle or some other system and merge it with a wiki and create courses with it. Might be interesting.