I believe that online education is the future, and will increasingly overtake traditional education both in participation and effectiveness.
Money is essential to traditional education. You need it to pay for a professor to sit in front of you and lecture; you need it to pay for the freakishly expensive books to supplement your lectures, and not to mention pay for living near said professor. With technology, education becomes a lot simpler. The world's leading minds are able to broadcast their knowledge for the entire world to see for free. Many educational institutions like MIT, UCBerley, Harvard, Yale, and UCLA have already taken advantage of sites like YouTube and have digitized entire lectures. Soon we will be able to not have to pay an upwards of $40,000 a year to receive a good education, and many more people from all around the world will be able to have an education.
The potential online education has is exponential, already organizations like the Khan Academy and The Open University project have revolutionized the way humans learn. In traditional education teachers would have to use a one-size-fits-all method to teach, often teaching either to slow, fast, visual, or descriptive for the majority of the class. This of coarse leaves the greater part of the class behind. However, with online education students learn at there own pace, with different variations of teaching. For example, the Khan Academy uses sophisticated software and quizzes at the end of videos to measure the progress a student makes, either recommending remedial videos with different methods of teaching or recommending more advanced videos, ensuring the student understand the subject correctly.
Online education has the potential to bring about a better educational system by providing a custom, effective, and inexpensive form of education.
Sources:
Info on the Khan Academy: here.
Info on YouTube initiatives: here.
Info on the Open University Project: here.
