I'm thinking the different models will work for some classes/ students, and not for others.
I just signed up for the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" class on Coursera. The professor seems to be intelligent and well-spoken. And the traditional lecture style works for me because I'll be listening while at work, and won't be able to have the video onscreen.
On the other hand, the intro video for the physics class on Udacity seems very engaging. The teacher is moving about, showing experiments, and will be travelling around the world, interviewing experts while teaching the class.
It makes me think about the evolution of writing from the stage to the screen. When actors were confined to a stage, dialogue was just between a few people sitting in a static scene - actions were kept to a minimum. The story was divided into distinct acts for set changes. With modern films, actors perform complex actions while speaking, we can have close-ups to show details, video and audio tracks can be separated, we can jump from a living room to Space battle and back again in a couple of seconds.
Udacity seems to have made that realisation - that they're not confined to that single medium shot of the desk. They can make material more engaging, incorporate other media, props; instantly change locations, or teach through visual demonstration rather than speech.
I'm not very technical, but I did try the AI class - it felt a little dumbed down to me so I lost interest.
It will be interesting to see what other websites and services people come up with to add value to online education. I'm thinking of things like:
* Study group sites: people meet in cafes or libraries to go through class materials together. To work on class projects, or build business ideas together. You could have people with complimentary knowledge meeting up to collaborate on projects.
* Career guidance: You could do a test to determine what your strengths and interests are, and the site would give you career and education options - then select courses for you to complete with certification.
* Education portfolio: A student may want to have a collection of their best essays and projects to demonstrate their knowledge to gain employment or an internship.
* Research projects: There could be a site which shows the premise of student's research topics. Labs or real-world universities could headhunt people with promising ideas.
Actually, what I really want out of these online universities is an archive of endangered courses. A lot of people seem to want pure technical skills at the moment. But there are so many niche courses in the arts and humanities which are difficult to maintain in real-world universities, and lot of them go extinct.
I hope one of these sites reaches out to professors who are no longer teaching, and get all of their coursework online. I want to have entire courses on, say, a small tribe in Papua New Guinea, concepts of gender and sexuality in some fallen civilisation.
And I also want to have courses from different cultures and languages subtitled with English - bush survival knowledge of indigenous Australians; or old Japanese art techniques.