Bild056Many universities are beginning to offer more and more lecture content on online platforms like YouTube, etc. One of the most promising portals might be the one by Princeton University which serves aggregated audio and video from academic institutions around the world at UChannel.

MIT, Harvard, UCLA, Yale, Oxford and many others by now have their own quickly growing lecture portals with access to thousands of lessons, and yes – in most cases it’s completely free.

So one might ask: Why pay thousands and thousands of tuition fees if you can attend lectures by top professor and specialists online? For university food, heating costs, rent, etc? Probably not.

Will the university of the future just be some kind of mass-transit online platform with no or minimum physical contact? Maybe. But there’s a serious question here. In what ways does sitting together in a physical classroom actually justify the costs, stress levels and time involved around this setup?