A university offers a lot more than just classes--one of the primary functions is just to bring together lots of smart people. Being able to talk to both other students and professors face to face is important; and having plenty of other like-minded students around is great for more than just classes.
On top of this, universities also offer research. Being able to work on something exciting while you're there is important. And research benefits both from having a high concentration of smart people and having the appropriate facilities. (It also sometimes benefits from having a university full of guinea pigs :).)
Also, while most CS classes are easy to move online, this does not hold for other technical subjects which need equipment and labs. An online-only EE or Bio or Physics class cannot reproduce the hands-on experience which is very important to understanding the material well.
I think its important to distinguish that a lot of EE, biology, or physics classes could moved into an online format because not all of these classes are labs. The demos would be easy to replicate just as part of the videos of the lectures.
I'm a graduate student in the sciences and every biology, chemistry and physics class that I took had a lab, except the evolution class. You could put the lectures online, but universities will never be completely replaced, as long as people want to learn science or do research.
>as long as people want to learn science or do research
Maybe this will create a large demand for amateur level/mass producable/cheap lab equipment and that would eventually lead to a situation like PC vs Server where even top notch servers are ~ comodity hardware on steroids. This would lower the barrier for innovation significantly.
hmm, at Caltech (my school) the courses are very much divided into either lecture courses or lab courses, and the phys/chem/bio majors probably have 2/3 lecture classes and 1/3 lab classes. The lecture only classes could very easily be put into an online format.
Blockbuster is more than videos. It provides jobs to youth and sells snacks to customers. All of which is irrelevant to their basic economics when people stop buying from them.
If 10-25% of students decide to learn online, a university's budget is seriously compromised.
This could shutter a lot of the teaching-focused universities.
It wouldn't really work the way you are thinking. If 10-25% of applicants to the college I went to decided to go to Udacity instead, my college would have had exactly the same number of freshman and wouldn't notice a dollar difference in its revenue. They already only admitted X% of the people who wanted to come in, where 0%<X<100%.
So these online college courses aren't going to kill regular universities. They might make the odds of getting in easier as some people forego normal college for online school.
Likely the schools that currently struggle to fill their classes (lower tier schools, for-profit schools) will go out of business, but these online classes simply aren't going to hurt the big colleges.
A university offers a lot more than just classes--one of the primary functions is just to bring together lots of smart people. Being able to talk to both other students and professors face to face is important; and having plenty of other like-minded students around is great for more than just classes.
On top of this, universities also offer research. Being able to work on something exciting while you're there is important. And research benefits both from having a high concentration of smart people and having the appropriate facilities. (It also sometimes benefits from having a university full of guinea pigs :).)
Also, while most CS classes are easy to move online, this does not hold for other technical subjects which need equipment and labs. An online-only EE or Bio or Physics class cannot reproduce the hands-on experience which is very important to understanding the material well.