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It is very much likely that the future students will be faced with an entirely different set of choices than they do have today. College or career straight after high school graduation, will not be the only paths in front of them.
The four-to-six-year commitment to a highly esteemed institution will not be the fastest way to a fruitful career or a rich network.
Considering the fact that the online education is quickly gaining the momentum, as well as the increased emergence of massive online courses (MOOCs) higher education is shaken to its core. Its value, its status, its cost is also changing. The fact how young people envision their education is changing their < future development and choices.
Stanford
artificial intelligence class at Stanford. Last year there were more than 175,000 people at his course. He is just one good example how MOOCs will establish a radically different future for students.
Google
Thrun, founder of Google X, the incubator for projects like the Google self-driving and Google Glass, co-founder of Udacity, a free online school that offers higher educational classes in computer science, from Programming Languages to How to Build a Startup asked at for PBS Newshoursays: “Right now you go to college for four, six, seven years, and it’s a big commitment over a long period of time. But in the future, learning will be lifelong, and it will happen in very small chunks. If you have an interest, a problem, if you need a skill, you’ll go find it and learn it. Things like degrees and classes and so on, will be replaced by entire sequences of achievements in the learning space but also in the kinds of things we can do in the project space.”
Thrun is convinced that some kids may not even have to graduate from high school, especially if they know from an early age that they’re interested in a field like engineering. He explains: “Probably at the of 13 or 14, they’re already great at engineering, they’re proficient on different systems and they’re able to demonstrate it.”
In such cases, rather than having higher education be related to some future idea of a job, Thrun believes that the equation will change. He would like to see the times when job choices we make will reinforce the education. In his opinion, job begins much earlier than education – it begins in the motivation to be educated.
Coursera
On the same topic,Co-founder of Coursera says that the biggest opportunity is to make considerable progress toward a degree, before students have to make a commitment to going to school to complete it. Students who typically have an “undermatching” problem, aim for colleges that are less selective than what they might aspire to -thus are less likely to get a degree.
This comes from the fact that they can have the experience of taking classes from top-notch universities and see a different option for themselves. They can take these courses and say, that they can aspire to the top colleges, like Stanford, Princeton or Columbia. With this, the door to a much higher success rate for students from disadvantaged backgrounds is open.
Students who already have intention of applying to top-tier universities, can use the online classes for the college admissions process.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, no one can predict for sure what will come of the top-ranked schools with the availability of online classes. But, if there is any hand-wringing about the changes, people should consider what is happening just now.
Definitely, things are not going to be the same in any segment of the education. More advanced technologies will influence the learning processes in a higher extent, and this process will accelerate as they advance.