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My daughter (who is in her first year at a Canadian University) texted me a few days ago to tell me that everyone in the lecture she was attending (about 200 students) were on their ‘devices’ because the lecture just wasn’t that captivating – sadly reminding me of much of my time spent at University. Higher education is broken. It’s been broken for a long time.

Universities exist for two reasons – to grant degrees and to do research. That’s been the case for hundreds of years. The teaching piece is just what keeps the wheels greased. Lets assume for the sake of argument that the quality of university professors follows a normal distribution pattern. The vast majority of University professors are average (statistically this has to be true but polls have shown that most of them would place themselves in the top quartile of professors), some are great and some are awful. Right now tens of thousands of average professors are teaching the same stuff to millions of students – some of them in overstuffed lecture halls.

Universities are generating from $250,000 to $500,000 or more for a single generic mega-class course. I’d expect Tony Robins or Bill Clinton to show up for that type of return. The argument is that Universities have to generate revenues at this level to fund their more expensive research activities. Uh huh.  In business this is called ‘bundling’, where you charge for a whack of filler material to justify the high price of the thing that is really in demand. The web is changing this model – just ask the recording industry. Are universities creating real value for this windfall? Could this be done more efficiently?

What if students could virtually ‘attend’ the best lectures from the very best professors from around the world. What if these lectures were supplemented by real world examples and research put together in a compelling manner that allows students to take part in a much more immersive and experiential form of learning. Wouldn’t it be more efficient if Universities specialized is specific disciplines or sub-disciplines and shared (for a fee, of course…) their research and applied knowledge online with other schools – letting the more inefficient factory education systems die a natural death. Thousands of profs all teaching Psych 100 to millions of students each year is not efficient. We need a hand full of really, really good profs creating ground breaking curriculum that can be shared with everyone (for a fee, of course…).

The institutions will do everything in their power to stop this from happening. They have a vested interest in keeping things the same way they’ve been since the 1700′s. Which brings me to cooking classes at Harvard…

Harvard introduced a new class this year in their general education stream called “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter”. The course was developed by the Harvard School of Engineering as an applied science course featuring top chef’s like Spain’s Ferran Adria. Adria applies his molecular cooking techniques to a variety of complex scientific subjects from basic chemistry to materials science to applied physics.

Harvard has also expanded this course material into a very popular public lecture series featuring combined presentations by top chefs and top scientists. This public series is a huge hit and Harvard is going to be making these public lectures available for free. Brilliant. My guess is that this freely available video series is just the beginning. Once this genie is out of the bottle it will be very hard to put back in.

I acknowledge that as a world class university, Harvard has a definite competitive advantage but it’s this type of thinking – be inventive, bring the best people in the world together and make information widely available – that will keep Harvard at the forefront of education.

Is change possible? Visit TED to get a glimpse of what world class (free, by the way…) lectures look like. Who knows, perhaps YouTube and Facebook might just be the levers that force our educational institutions to reconsider their future.