I think that the whole concept of lectures is broken. Twenty years ago they were appropriate, but now we have YouTube and PDF files and Print-On-Demand. These technologies means that universities don't have to employ lackluster lecturers, but can instead create highly-crafted lecture videos (in the style of Khan Academy) and comprehensive lecture notes. Certainly these materials will cost a lot to produce, but they can be used year after year, with only minor corrections for the changing course syllabus.

If a university would create proper learning materials and drop the lectures, there would be a lot more time to have more discussion-based and hands-on learning.

I'm so with you and I happen to have a project where I'm creating a system that can "slot in" to this new kind of education mix I think we're heading towards. Death to mindless traditions! The future is now if we let it. ;)

Are you referring to Zyguild? I checked it out on your website, and it sounds intriguing. How do you plan on providing "quality filtering, education, certification and alumni networking"? I'd love to know more.

haha. nice! good find. actually it's something else. that idea is on the backburner for now. I decided my Zyguild vision had more competitors and was much harder to scale up with small staff/money than another idea I had, so focusing on another project instead. General problem: too many ideas, not enough time-energy-money to work on them all. :)

I do think traditional education is a dinosaur ripe for disruption, and has lots of cheap-to-start and reasonably-easy-ways-to-scale things you can do in the space. I'd argue that much of it (current traditional mass/government education) is an artifact or echo from an prior time back before the Internet existed, computers, video telecomm. Why settle for local teachers when you can have the best location-irrelevant ones? Why settle for static education content when you can have dynamic, interactive ones? Why settle for only 1 or a few types of approved resource mediums when there are hundreds of them, some not even possible 30 years ago? Why allow our kids to be fed nationalist propaganda in government-run schools when much more objective, honest and worldly alternatives exist? Why embarass the slower kids by putting them in the same room with the really smart ones? Why slow down and hold back the fast ones? Why setup vast complicated systems and bureaucracies just to generate a proxy for the thing you want (an interview, a test, a degree, etc.), when you can just go after The Thing You Want directly? (Or more directly.)