I spent a couple of hours yesterday linking through the online education site from Dan's link in the comment section to Kahn Academy.
Hoo-boy... once this breaks through to the education consuming public all hell is going to break lose in that market place. COUNT ON IT. Organizations like this are going to to do to the education industry what online news did to the print media (how research is conducted remains to be seen). Anybody that pays $200k for just about ANY under-grad education (and this is going to wipe the floor with the high school system as well). is making an outrageous error (unless they are rich, that is). Come on! Do we need to pay somebody $200k per year for 6 hours of work per week to repeat the same lecture over and over again? Some guy with a 190 IQ from Bhopal, India will be happy to put up the lecture - complete with source documents and graphical explanation - for much, much less. And once its there, we certainly don't need LEGIONS of these $200k-per-year-6-hour-work-week folks. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Pythagorus, Euclid, et al did an awful lot of thinking for a great deal less compensation.
BTW... CEO's? Same drill as College Professors.
America's university system has evolved to serve the same purpose that speaking accents serve in the U.K. and photos on resumes served in places like Chile and Argentina (It was a way for the establishment families to distinguish their offspring from the working class). Of course, greed and self-serving dealing always rear their ugly head and this has been the case in spades within the University system.
But there is something else going on here. The rate of change in scientific breakthroughs has declined dramatically, today's pop artists are "sampling" the underlying musical progression of songs popular generations ago, symphonies are not being written at the rate of increase in the population, and we have all of the self-help DIY books that we are EVER GOING TO NEED.
How many more 3 chord rock n' roll songs does the population need? (Here is a great link for us older folks... a beautiful collage of music and photography. Enjoy.)
Perhaps we have reached "Peak Useful Data", or perhaps I should say the point of diminishing returns for useful data.