I doubt that many of our children will forego residential college for online courses, but the question may be which courses are best taken online and which in person. Large introductory classes where you don't interact with the professor anyway may be the ones you take through online classes before college.

Online courses may free students to follow their intellectual interests in college, knowing that they can take "practical" courses later or concurrently. For example, Harvard Business School has created HBX CORe, an 11-week online course on the basics of business. It grew out of a pre-MBA curriculum they had for MBA students who had not majored in business.

The impending surge for the University of Everywhere
By George Leef
Pope Center
March 25, 2015

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No—it’s real and the U.S. (make that the world) is on the brink of the greatest educational change since Gutenberg invented printing. That is the argument Kevin Carey presents in his new book The End of College. Rapid improvements in information technology are already giving students far better learning opportunities than they’d get in the vast majority of “real” courses, and at almost no cost.

Carey calls this fast-emerging educational landscape the University of Everywhere. Once people discover that the high cost college degree—which doesn’t necessarily betoken any level of knowledge or skill—is no longer obligatory, many colleges will find their enrollments plunging. Those that survive will offer solid education at reasonable cost. Higher education as we’ve known it, organized mainly for the benefit of the purveyors of education, will give way to new modes of teaching and assessment based on the needs of learners.

Carey sums up the weakness of the typical American college this way, “Students are left to the whims of professors who haven’t been trained to teach and aren’t accountable for helping students learn….Colleges give 19-year-olds too many reasons to have fun and not enough reasons to study consistently and thoughtfully.”

Quite so, but why does Carey believe that online courses are such a great improvement? Because he took one. Not just any course, but MIT’s introductory biology course, The Secret of Life, taught by Professor Eric Lander, who can put at the head of his list of accomplishments having led the Human Genome Project. To take this course, all Carey had to do was to sign-up online, then start watching the videos. (He could also read Professor Lander’s text, which he largely did.)