Please note that many of us from whom you are waiting for an answer are borderline depressives or really depressives. Hence the delays in answering emails. If your professor is both a procrastinator and a borderline depressive then you’ll have to be patient and the best thing in an administrative situation is probably simply to knock on the door.

ciao,
Bruce

At point 1) The work I do as tutor cannot be compared to teaching at university. I don’t work for a virtual university (i.e. something that comes close to a real university). All I’m saying is that in the near future virtual universities could outperform real universities.

Point 2) I think that things will change gradually. The virtual institutions will have to prove themselves. You can imagine a virtual university avoiding the problems you mention by offering Ph.D. courses to high school graduates. I.e. you get an education and then you’ll have to produce a Ph.D. thesis based on your peer reviewed publications. Your CV will contain a list of publications, no one can argue with that.

Later, when the virtual university has made its name, can it also focus on students who only want to do an M.Sc.

So far I’ve been sorely disappointed. Most (certainly not all, there have been a few exceptional cases) of the professors I’ve dealt with seem to think of teaching as a burden. Their lecture styles were uninspired, and for the most part paraphrased (if you were lucky enough not to get a verbatim reading) the book. I don’t expect professors to be “nice” per se, but what I do expect is an honest attempt to communicate ideas from the subject they are teaching. This includes thinking of new ways to introduce difficult topics and tying concepts together in a way that sheds light on the unity and synergy of different branches of the subject.

Not everyone can be Richard Feynman, but I believe it’s part of the job you take on when you accept a professorship at a university to pass on knowledge to posterity in the best possible way that you can.

Thanks.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a second-year graduate student.”

“Then you should be able to figure that out by yourself,” Glashow replied.

I did and I never forgot the answer.

The benefit of studying books, working book problems, and having one-on-one tutoring undoubtedly varies from person to person, but I don’t think the on-site learning experience is the most compelling reason to attend a university. There are other less tangible but crucial benefits of attending a university that cannot be replaced by a “distance learning” approach:

1. The professors and TAs have (usually) been screened by knowledgeable people before given the opportunity to substantially influence others. Prospective professors may be evaluated on their research rather than teaching ability at many universities, but at least they must know their stuff to get hired. TAs must usually take coursework (or be subject to high standards before being admitted to a university, e.g., Princeton), and usually pass qualifying exams; they are also evaluated by students and/or professors for their teaching. I doubt that any for-profit tutoring company will have anywhere near that level of screening before hiring a tutor. But you should know, since you were hired as a tutor.

2. Pedigree matters. When it comes time to look for a job, where you learned counts. If all you have to say is that you studied a particular set of books and were tutored by some completely unknown person with a PhD who had no affiliation with a recognized organization like a respected university, I can’t imagine very many potential employers getting very excited about you. I also find it difficult to see funding agencies being thrilled about giving most grants to researchers with no institutional affiliation.

3. Grades provide some measure of mastery of material, as well as preparation for moving to the next level of material. Getting grades from a tutor who is payed by you (read: conflict of interest) is likely to be somewhat meaningless to a graduate school or employer; the grading would be very non-standard and would not be normalized with other tutors or students.

4. Remote learning would do nothing to address the needs for most kinds of research that are part of a PhD education. (Presumably you do want PhD’s, since they are your future population of qualified tutors.) Some kinds of theoretical research might be possible remotely, but experimental research would be difficult to do on one’s own.

5. Design of the curriculum would be problematic. Having a separate “standards organization” that designs curricula and administers some kind of “exit exam” that certifies the student as having completed the course of study sounds unworkable. Who would administer the organization, fund it, judge whether the standards are appropriate, create the tests, and so on? By the time you do all that, wouldn’t you essentially have a remote university, many of which already exist?

I just don’t see your vision of education in the future as being attractive to a wide audience.

Also, not every student studies in the same way. Some benefit more from social interactions while studying others not.

By not attending any classes and problem sesions you are forcing yourself to completely master the subject yourself. Also, you have more time to do that as less time is wasted at university. I found that to be the best way of studying for me.

I remember going to the university once for an exam (about Fourier transformations and the theory of distributions). Some of my friends were asking what I was doing here, they had never seen me at the course. The exam result was very good for me, I scored 100%. But it was not so good for the other students. One scored 70% and one other scored 60%. All the other students (about 25 in total) had failed the exam.

Count Iblis, I think you are underestimating the importance of human interaction when it comes to teaching. Who’s going to explain that concept you just have a blind spot for? Who will help you when you can’t solve the exercises? In fact, who’s going to tell you which books to get in the first place?

Yes, agree that some tuition is necessary. But this doesn’t have to cost many thousands of dollars per year. The student I helped (see posting #7) payed me $1000 in total. But this student asked me to explain everything completely and do all his homework for him.

They already exist, The Open University in the UK, or Fernuni Hagen in Germany, people get much more “one to one” distance tutoring and it sucks. A friend of mine did this and switched to a regular University after 2 Years. They have their use but they are not ever going to replace traditional Universities. The reasons are that there is no substitute for interacting with other students and for seeing someone explain something in person.

Coming from the continental European system: A university doesn’t need or even shouldn’t provide massive amounts of one on one time with lecturers, it should provide students with the means to figure things out for themselves. If they can’t do that they don’t belong in a University in the first place. That means trusting people with a lot of free time in which to do their own studies, providing them with rooms and libraries where they can meet and organize themselves into study groups (they are grown ups, so this shouldn’t be something the University has to do for them), etc. Ideally some kind of seminar where they can come meet grad students who answer their questions (AFTER they honestly tried to do them on their own).

One of the core problems about answering one on one is that only one person benefits, if you get them into groups of 20 people the real (non lazy) questions can be answered and a lot of students benefit.
One on one explaining is just not a very efficient use of highly trained experts time.

Feynman was very giving of his time. He used to have an undergrad “course” at Caltech called “Physics X” in which he just answered any questions posed to him. His only ground rule, as I recall, was that the questioner had to understand the question he was asking (e.g. don’t ask about the subtleties of the Bethe-Salpeter equation, if you don’t know what the equation is.).

Wheeler was also quite nurturing toward his grad students. I know of one grad student who, on the verge of quitting physics, asked Wheeler to assess his talent as a physicist. Wheeler didn’t hesitate to give this student the blatantly dishonest but nonetheless encouraging answer, “You are as talented as any student I’ve ever taught.” I doubt that Feynman ever needed to see this compassionate side of Wheeler, however.

You’ve got to be kidding? This does not follow logically in any reasonable way. Why one to one? Why do you think there is no overhead on the costs?

Of course, there are overhead costs, but that doesn’t explain the huge difference in tuition fees in the US compared to Europe.

Also, in case of theoretical physics, you have to study almost everything from books yourself anyway. Almost all of the learning happens when you pick up the book, read it and solve the problems. This means that it should be possible to completely master theoretical physics at the graduate level for no more than the cost of a few books, let’s say $1000 at most.