Are free or cheap online college classes a threat to colleges?

My Telegraph column today is about a software-writing friend who was blown away by a free UCal-Berkeley online course about programming software-as-a-service (basically, how to write software that's hosted in the cloud - i.e., bounces around among a lot of servers). The course was hard and useful in ways she hadn't expected. It was taken through Coursera, a Stanford University project, one of several attempts to use technology to replace, not just augment, the traditional college experience.

You can read my column here.

The best thing I did at college was meet people while working (ha!) at the college radio station - I'm not sure how easy it would be for the online world to replicate that kind of in-person serendipity. But then again, I'm kind of old ...