The Traditional University Lecture Is Dead

This post is part of Hire Education, an ongoing series in which ReadWrite examines technological innovation in education and how it’s reshaping universities that are preparing students for a transformed workforce.

Why pay thousands of dollars to sit in a stuffy university lecture hall as a professor drones away in front of bored students when you could instead take some of the world’s greatest courses online? For free?

A handful of startups and university-backed nonprofits are starting to deliver on that proposition—one that could upend higher education, not to mention the plans of millions of students who are aiming to position themselves for employment in today’s digital economy. Of course, the trend is still in its infancy, with big challenges ahead where student retention, university cooperation and business models are concerned.

But proponents of the online-education revolution aren’t shy about their ambitions. Sebastian Thrun, a former Stanford professor who co-founded the startup Udacity two years ago, reportedly believes that in 50 years, there will only be 10 institutions in the world providing higher education—with Udacity, of course, potentially one of them.

Off To A Fast Start—Sort Of

This online movement is centered around “massive open online courses,” which go by the ungainly acronym MOOCs. These are typically college-style lectures reconfigured for the online student, complete with lecture video (of varying production value), assignments and interactive discussions. The aim is to provide instruction similar to what students can get in a traditional college atmosphere, only more cheaply and conveniently.

Websites like Udacity, Coursera and the non-profit edX (founded in mid-2012 by Harvard and MIT) offer an array of programs taught by established professors at big-name universities. Students register with an email and can begin taking classes on a rolling basis. There is no application process, and the thousands of students taking one class can get there in a few clicks.

MOOCs are clearly starting to catch on. Traditional colleges and universities enrolled almost 20 million people