Udacity represents the evolution of the textbook, not the university

Let me immediately say that I hope Udacity succeeds. I hope it is a resource that many people throughout the world use.

It would be nice if it did. I'll soon be paying tuition for a child. I'd really, really like to write a check for $20 and the semester's tuition bill would be paid in full.

Now let me rain on the parade. Udacity is not a university. The claim is that they have a model that is much more efficient than the traditional university. There's no sense paying for the name value of a university when you can get the same education for just a few dollars. They've found the hundred dollar bill laying on the sidewalk, so to speak.


It's the opposite of my experience, and pretty much everyone I've ever talked to, that class size doesn't matter. Existing universities, especially Big 10 universities, could put tens of thousands of students in a football stadium, if the only goal is to provide as many students as possible with access to a lecture. The University of Michigan could put 100,000 students into a class, charge them each $5, and be extremely profitable. Too bad it's not that easy.

The large classroom is possible because they have cut out things that most of us who have a college degree found to be important. You have no access to the instructor. No questions. No requests for further information about a particular topic. Nothing. Instead, you get an internet forum, where others can choose to donate their time, and the answer may or may not be correct, and may or may not make sense.

There is no grading beyond what can be automated. For some things that's okay, but clearly that limits on what can be tested. This format would not work for essay questions, of course, or for that matter, anything but multiple choice questions, which in my experience are only useful for measuring your ability to memorize.

There's no possibility to interact with the instructor during the lecture. You watch a lecture on the computer. There are no discussions (except perhaps in an internet forum).

The instructor cannot make adjustments depending on the background of the students. That's because with tens of thousands of students, you have many backgrounds, and there doesn't exist a sensible adjustment that would help the students.

There is no library, no computer lab, none of the resources that you get with a traditional university. There are no opportunities to get a letter of recommendation from a professor. There are no opportunities to work on research with a professor. The whole point is to eliminate anything that is personal from the equation. If a professor teaches 40,000 students and has to write recommendation letters for the top 1% of the class, that's still 400 letters, assuming there were something to write about. 

To top it off, there is currently no verification that students are actually doing the work themselves. There would have to be a way to monitor students during the exams and projects. Of course some cheating occurs in a regular classroom. The Udacity model doesn't even require that you verify that someone is who they claim to be. You could register as three individuals, take the exam twice for practice, then take it a third time for your "grade". Or better, just pay someone $100 to take the exam for you.

It sounds good to claim they have found the silver bullet that will lower the cost of a college education. As I said above, I will save tens of thousands of dollars if they have. Yet when I look at it, what I see is some video lectures, homework and exams, and an internet forum. In other words, a textbook built with modern technology. You could go a step further. Post a reading list online for free. Then students could work through your "university course" and get the equivalent of an expensive university education.

Sorry, it's just not that easy. It's not like there's anything here that hasn't been tried before. What they're doing is not that different from claiming to have found a silver bullet to lower the cost of developing software by eliminating all testing. If the program compiles and runs, that's good enough. True, that would lower costs, but then you'd no longer be developing the software you claim to be developing. Self study and formal education are not the same thing. It's the 15% difference between the two that is so expensive, yet so critical.