Fred Wilson is right: This is a great PPT on hacking education:
I have a chapter in my book about hacked education. In the comments in this post, Bob Wyman was very helpful in extracting the functions of a university: teaching, testing, and research — to which I added a fourth, socialization. Separating those functions, one wonders which need to be part of a universityi and which don’t.
After writing it, I was talking with Bob Kerrey of the New School as he praised the quality of the lectures available online from MIT. I suggested that the aggregated university could be built around a distributed version of the Cambridge system with lecturers (the guys from MIT) and tutors (local teachers who guided students personally). Thus s learn from the world’s best while also getting the attention they need.
There are lots more models worth exploring: education by subscription, education as a club, learning networks, universities as incubators (with students following Google’s 20 percent rule and taking a fifth of their time to create something).
As the PowerPoint points out, every other industry and institution is facing upheaval — and opportunities — in the change of the internet age. Education above others should too.
