[Velociraptor]

Doesn't it depend on what you mean exactly by the "age of the internet". At the moment it isn't outdated as the first issue our world has to deal with is giving everyone across the globe access to the internet. Obviously this isn't taking into account the most important issues of people around the world: poverty, starvation, disease etc. But when we get to the stage where everyone in the world has access to the internet then online education and courses are, in my opinion, the best way forward.

[puppypower]

Not everyone is able to learn on their own. With internet learning it is hard to ask questions if you do not understand. Picture someone trying to learn, Relativity, without being able to ask questions. This can be counter intuitive and often it takes one on one and lots of questions to have it make sense.

 In other cases, some things need hands on experience to learn properly. It is easier to understand the practical side of chemicals, by being able to do some lab work. For example, you can teach someone about precipitation of chemicals or they can watch a video, but it is another things to see it happen with you eyes in reality and then toy with the parameters to learn new things.

A third problem is misinformation, fake news, and biased education. A good teacher will epoxies you to all sides and many angles. While internet learning, based on individual bias choices, can focus one until they become a half brain. Sometimes the other half brain needs to be force fed until it is well.

I suppose the discussion forum format, like we do here, could solve this last concern.

[miсhaelpeters]

I believe that it is. With the help of i get everything that i need. I believe that it can help a lot of people all around the world.

[joeblackwood]

Higher education is expensive, while Internet access is cheap.

[RjMaan]

No one can exactly say the higher education is outdated infect it is modified with the use of internet.

[thinkaroo]

The knowledge communicated through higher education is being increasingly replaced by access through technology. Higher education also provides a forum for relationships with other like-minded people and those relationship networks will be much more difficult to replicate with educational technology.

[David Cooper]

We are spending a fortune giving people irrelevant degrees to sell hamburgers and clean toilets, and while we train them for jobs they never actually get, we are short of doctors and have to poach them from poorer countries so that they can't look after their own kin. It is appalling mismanagement.

[alancalverd]

Facts have been available since printing was invented. Education isn't about learning facts, it's about learning how to use them.

[CristinaFinn]

The biggest problem with higher education is that it has increasingly become a money-making business with everyone being encouraged to rack up massive debt, and that debt usually ends up falling on the heads of the taxpayer. It's fine for taxpayers to pay for people to acquire skills, knowledge and understanding where those things are transmitted efficiently and where they are subsequently going to be used, but the vast bulk of this learning is simply not used (or has very little impact in improving people's performance in the things they end up doing). Our quality of life is then heavily suppressed by the fact we're spending so much money on education that isn't useful.

The problem isn't with people spending a lot of time learning, but the cost and inefficiency of that learning, and any requirement for people to have qualifications that go far beyond the skills and knowledge that are actually necessary for a given job. Much of this has been done in order to keep people out of the unemployment statistics for longer, but it would be a lot less costly just to pay them to be unemployed and allow them to spend their time studying the same things without having to pay extortionate fees. Anyone who is capable of getting a degree should also be fully capable of doing all the learning independently without having to tie themselves to a university, and many of them should be capable of getting their degree without doing anything beyond turning up to sit exams. We are collectively getting poorer as we pour more and more money into education, and this is primarily driven by people's irrational belief that we all need jobs and that we have to create more and more of them. Half the workforce is already tied up in work which is not adding to our wellbeing in any way, but which merely squanders valuable resources for no purpose other than to keep unemployment down. Millions of parents are paying a fortune to have other people look after their children for them badly while they themselves sit in offices doing pointless work that simply doesn't need to be done. It is utter insanity. We are supposed to be liberating ourselves from toil, but we've locked ourselves into old ways of thinking which used to make sense but which are now obsolete. Education is great, but it shouldn't be allowed to cost us the Earth.

I totally agree with you. I have the same analysis after recently passing out from one of the renowned university. The practical implementation of this money making machine concept gradually become inaccessible to highly skillful students due to lack of money. This mindset is getting worse in many countries now.

Secondly, I also feel that our professors must acquire knowledge of growing Internet-related Industry, most of them really lacking with the knowledge and that's where students suffer alot.

[Ophiolite]

The internet is moderately effective at conveying data, information and knowledge. I've seen only minimal evidence it has any hope of success in conveying wisdom.

[CliffordK]

Facts have been available since printing was invented. Education isn't about learning facts, it's about learning how to use them.

Yep... 
Actually, it is about accumulating some facts, as well as learning how to apply those facts. 

Life will change in the future as huge databases of information are being built and at one's fingertips.  But, a person also has to be able to make connections between very different information. 

Think about basic physics, and the relationship between distance, velocity, and acceleration.  All the equations are there at one's fingertips, but it would be easy to get lost if one doesn't even know which questions to ask.  Integrals?  Derivatives?  Constants?  etc.

And, also knowing how to communicate between individuals is important.  I.E.  learning the language of the field of interest.  Again, the information is available, but one has to know how to look for it.

But, say writing a novel, or a research paper takes practice, and probably a fair amount of training too.

[Rolerwill]

This thread surely has aged very well, I see all the comments are pre-pandemic so post-pandemic world is yet to be considered.
 
The way I see it, the biggest problem with education is that is not and shouldn't be a one size fits all, meaning we cannot expect all students to learn the structural way is established now. I always one the kind of student that would be fascinated to listen to a lecture, hence I liked school and I was a "good" student. I was lucky enough to have back then good teachers that would teach me "how to think and how to learn" instead of just "you have to learn this because it's the way it is and that's it". But now with all of this technology, free online apps and many other educational resources I see how it opened a new way for students that have a more independent way to approach learning. My niece for example at school is labeled as an "ok student" because even though she's smart she likes to play with her friends and sometimes she gets distracted. But here's the thing, at home when doing her homework she gets to a stage of high concentration and zero distractions, so whenever she gets stuck let's say with a calculus problem she would open up this newbielink:https://www.studypug.com/pre-calculus [nonactive] or khan academy and get help instantly and move forward. Back in the day we wouldn't have all these resources mainly because technology wasn't at that stage and I know it could have helped many of my friends, did that mean the life of said friends went into and end? Of course not, which illustrates the point I want to make, both current education system and education with the age of the internet are needed, it's not like we only can have one or the other. Rather that discussing if one is better than the other or if the old one is not needed since there's a new one, I think the discussion should be "ok, how can we merge the new one with the old one in a way that we could benefit all ways of learning".  Which I believe it's what the education has been moving towards.

[JesWade21]

The issue with simply replacing the entire education system with "the internet" is that you don't know what you don't know. Without any additional experience. pedson You can't be sure you're not missing something important when curating a curriculum; for someone going into electrical engineering, I'd think this would be a particularly obvious flaw in the plan. What if you didn't properly Google certain safety features or best practices, and there was no one around to point out that you'd missed something crucial?