Bill Gates, in a recent interview at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, shared the following:

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

We’ve been hearing thoughts like that for a long time. And, why shouldn’t we? Any system that’s in effect for a few years gets questioned, let alone one that’s been in existence for centuries.

My Experience

I’ve been a college student for two years now. As I enter my third, I still wonder if the time I’m spending in college is valuable. It’s not that I don’t value an education. It’s just that I’m thinking of my approach to getting an education just like any good hacker would: I wonder if it’s the optimal choice.

I came into college expecting absolutely nothing. Deep down, however, I have always been hoping that my experience in the classroom is insightful and exhilarating.

What I got, on the other hand, has been anything but. I’ve been taught a whole deal of information in a very short condensed format. On top of that, it was done in a huge boring lecture hall, often with hundreds of other students.

To call the format uninteractive would be a huge understatement. Too often, the lecture was simply an old man reading off PowerPoint slides. Sometimes, it would be the same lecturer teaching the same subject for years. When comparing lecture notes, I could occasionally find that the lecture notes didn’t even change. Usually, this professor didn’t seem at all to be interested in the subject. There was about a zero percent chance of him having an idea who I was.

After a while, I finally figured out that one didn’t need to go to lecture. Not only was everything online, but since the lecturer rarely added insight, I could simply stay home and learn what I needed to get an A on the midterm and final. That, in the end, was the only thing that mattered.

Colleges try to downplay this, talking about the “average” classes being under 50 or 20, etc. But the truth is that this lack of interactivity is evident in every instance. Even in the smaller “recitation” classes, rarely does it turn into a good discussion. A graduate student, who’s probably been forced to teach this class and most likely is not interested in the material, leads this class taking questions, administering tests, remembering your name.

I knew about that. But I had always thought that for some reason Computer Science will be different. People wouldn’t be treated like that in Computer Science. Much to my surprise, I walked into my first computer science class learning that I was about to learn the material through lecture notes that haven’t been updated in more than a decade. Even though it’s clearly 2010, my lab headers have the date when they were made prominently shown at the top: 1997. That’s unfortunate.

Solutions

So my quick response to the quote above is, “why shouldn’t it?”

What Gates is suggesting is that in the future, students will not be required to physically attend a university and go through all the hoopla, provided that you’re self-motivated.

In two years of studying Computer Science & Engineering, I have yet to learn anything I didn’t already know. That’s sad.

Where do I learn the necessary programming skills? You know, the ones that have placed me in internships and allowed me to create amazing applications. The skills that lead to my creativity, acting like an paintbrush in my hands as I etch something beautiful on some application, are honestly all I feel like I need. And every bit of that was taught to me by myself, on my own time with my own resources.

I’ve learned more about recursion, iterations, and objects from messing around with PHP or Python than I ever could have learned from studying PowerPoint slides. As exciting as learning about Partial Derivatives and Green’s Theorem are, I learned all the math I need to write amazing programs by doing things like Project Euler. Through something like that, I picked up on how to develop algorithms, how to sieve to get answers, and how to use highly-efficient processes in code.

I don’t have a class on Python at my university. Or, something on AJAX, jQuery, iOS apps, APIs and a whole slew of other things. As an alleged student of Computer Science, I’ve yet to take a mathematical class that discusses algorithms and as far as I know I will not even be required to take one.

Final Thoughts

Thankfully, I’m self-motivated. As are most good programmers. Most of the great web nerds started when they were young, teaching themselves how to program within their teenage years. To then be stuck in a hot and crowded lecture hall listening to a uninterested professor read notes off of a PowerPoint presentation that hasn’t been changed in the last five years is torture. Something must change.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re really already started seriously going down the path to educational reform. In the last few years, we’ve started seeing projects like Academic Earth and Knewton that have seriously started changing the learning environment. That’s only the beginning.

While you will never be able to replace the social element of attending a university, arguably the most important part of it, bit by bit we can hopefully knock over this outdated system. I dream of a day when the nerds finally turn the educational system upside down and replace it with something more efficient, personal, and interactive. Something tells me that will be soon.

Comments?

I don’t have comments on my website, but thankfully Hacker News does.

---