They’ve had their fair share of differences, but this time, Apple and Bill Gates are finally agreeing on something.
No, it’s not a collaboration on the next tech gizmo, but something that might actually benefit the world and society at large: education.
The Microsoft founder recently said at a conference that traditional universities will, in five years time, be completely replaced by the internet.
“Five years from now, on the web for free, you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” he said at the Techonomy conference held in August. “It will be better than any single university.”
And how are Apple getting in on this? The Cupertino-based company’s iTunes University, which provides academic journals and other educational material, has just topped 300 million downloads in the short three years its been around.
Like Bill Gates’ idea of a ‘place-less’ university, where teaching and lessons are all available online, iTunes U was created in collaboration with more than 800 colleges and universities worldwide.
The best part about all this isn’t the fact that these resources can be accessed from anywhere; it’s that this content is all free. So students can just download papers through iTunes, sync it to their iPhones or iPads and learn on-the-go.
But of course just having research papers up for download wouldn’t sound the death toll of the university. It lacks what Bill Gates truly meant: supervised online courses.
‘Online courses’ do sound a little bit dodgy, but if Apple can tap into this, what with the “world’s top institutions” already on iTunes U, who knows—Gates’ prediction might come to fruition after all.
Watch Bill Gates give a short talk here:
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