Jimmy Wales: Boring university lectures 'are doomed'

The boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses, new major players will emerge to displace them, in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer, writes Sean Coughlan for BBC News.

"I think that the impact is going to be massive and transformative," said Wales, describing the importance of MOOCs (massive open online courses) that have signed up millions of students. "It's also been slower than anyone would have anticipated. But I'm not a person who thinks that people will be able to just go online and get a complete education without the guidance of the teacher. That sort of simplistic model shouldn't be our framework."

Instead he thinks that universities need to use online technology where it really works.
Full report on the BBC News site