University Of YouTube

The traditional educational process is a thing of the past. The process was simple. You go to kindergarten through high school and then attend college. In college you choose some specific field of expertise and you go through a road-map of classes that should impart the necessary information for you to become useful to an employer in your desired industry. The most exciting thing to come along was the brief stint of laser disks, weren't those awesome. 

Now that the world is almost completely flat and communication across the world happens on a whim, a student has nothing holding him back from learning from a famous professor across the country. When I was in college I eventually learned that I could learn the material in my classes better by simply searching for instructional videos on YouTube. Math is a great example of where YouTube proved useful. I was struggling in my civil engineering classes because my professor was extremely dry and assumed we understood all of his jargon. (The average grades in his classes were very low and he lowered his passing grade standard to 55% because he would have had such a horrible pass/fail rate.) Anyway, I found that I could search the chapter title for each of our lessons on YouTube and find a great video from some student or professor that would explain the content better. Better yet, there's a rating system on YouTube that allows users to show whether the content is useful or not. This allowed me to quickly find videos that would teach me in a far superior manner to what I was paying for in school. 

This brings up the main problem. I was paying the college for my education but I was learning the actual content online and not from the college that was getting my money. In some cases the only thing college offered was accreditation that made a diploma worth anything. If YouTube would offer a standardized system that facilitated knowledge testing for various disciplines, they could be the best university in the country. Teachers would be determined by their skill in teaching and knowledge transfer. Professors would have to remain creative. There would be no such thing as that old musty professor that uses the same overhead slides for 30 years. Teacher reviews are inefficient. The better review system is to let each viewer say whether the video was useful or not. I continue to learn from YouTube. I believe there is great opportunity in online universities and I think YouTube has the best possibilities with its access to vast amounts of content. I'm excited to see what's happening when my kids are ready for college.