With the advent of social media and high speed internet, the dissemination of information has been on a steady rise. We get news in a matter of seconds 24x7. This advancement is also seen in the Education industry with many "Ed-Tech" amalgamations sprouting up-- companies that instruct through interactive lectures for a subsidized price than attending college. Companies such as Khan Academy and Coursera are in the forefront of this disruption.
A March 2012 study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 60% of American adults viewed universities as having a positive effect on how things are going in the country and 84% of college graduates say that the expense of going to college was a good investment for them. Yet another Pew Research Center survey in 2011 found that 75% of adults say college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. Moreover, 57% said that the higher education system in the U.S. fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend.
This shows that there is a big chance that the way we learn is changing and that the future might look quite different. The flip of this however is that technology has come and gone, but the education industry has remained pretty much the same. Significant improvement in the effectiveness and wider distribution of education accompany every major new communication technology. In the early days of their evolution, radio, television, personal computers—and even the telephone—were all predicted to be likely to revolutionize formal education. Nevertheless, the standardized knowledge-transmission model is primarily the same today as it was when students started gathering at the University of Bologna in 1088.
The internet however, is a different kind of beast which is taking over lives a lot more than just verbal communication. There are changes that we will see by the year 2020 with more hybrid learning and increased service in distance leaning programs that are able to educate far and wide. As developing countries such as India and China are increasing so are educational demands which will be met if not my an aging brick and mortar system. Though I do believe that going to a college changes you in a lot more ways than just staring at a computer, this might soon just be the thinking of the past.
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