Ten years from now a “college education” is going to look radically different from when I went to school. And I think that’s a good thing, especially when you consider the skyrocketing costs of “higher education” and the miserable job market that recent graduates have faced.
This all started for me when I first saw MIT’s Open Courseware and then when Standford offered a few Computer Science courses on-line. I had actually signed up for Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning class but never made time in my schedule to participate. Since then, Andrew and Daphne Koller have kicked things up a notch by starting Coursera. They’ve built a platform that allows instructors to distribute their courses to many, many people on-line at a very low cost.
If you haven’t seen it, take a minute and browse the list of courses. There are 124 at the time of this writing, and that’s up from just a few weeks ago. I’ve already signed up for several (check my Coursera Profile), one of which starts tomorrow.