I, Cringely: Information technology reporter Robert X. Cringely asks why academic education hasn't faced the price drops other industries connected to IT have faced:
MIT has all its lectures available for viewing for free over the Internet. Why hasn't some entrepreneur yet leveraged this amazing act of generosity? Some little school could outsource its entire physics department, for example, using MIT lectures and a single professor in-house. My physics department had only 2.5 professors (the .5 was the department chair who drove a cab on the side) and we didn't have the benefit of MIT video.There is enough good material available for free online right now that it would be easy to create a virtual university (WikiVersity?) with the only thing missing being the granting of degrees. It's that whole "degree from MIT" thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.
Why is that?
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