A post from Daniel Lemire's blog plays into the ideas I have about the future of education:
Getting serious about online teaching: "In this new online world, professors are not content providers. They provide structure and motivation. They are role models. And most importantly, by their reputation, professors can provide certification."
See also the Edge World Question Center response by Martin Rees, which Daniel Lemire also mentioned earlier (in a post with lots of interesting comments):
A level playing field: "Traditional universities will survive insofar as they offer mentoring and personal contact to their students. But it’s less clear that there will be a future for the ‘mass university’ where the students are offered little more than a passive role in lectures (generally of mediocre quality) with minimal feedback."
Some thoughts about this vision of the future:
An intensive one-on-one experience doesn't scale to hundred-student undergraduate lectures. How does this sort of "weed-out course" translate into this future university? The content of such courses can perhaps mapped to some required courseware, but will students want to risk much time spent on the idiosyncratic requirements of a particular teacher who may not accept them? Institutionally agreed upon curriculums could still be important.
Project portfolios would probably be important credentials. How will students get feedback from projects? What other metrics will be useful? I suddenly picture the university providing an online gaming-style system of students charting their progress and achievement points, hanging out in chatrooms looking for teammates on the next project quest. World of Warcraft as university model. You don't get a degree, but you can link to your profiles on different university-servers.
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