www.uopeople.edu/.

Online and free. Pay only for exams, i.e. exam as a service. Almost perfect according to Ciro Santilli's idea.

TODO is teaching material open or not?Asked: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1687865554722562048

You just have to spend a few minutes with students until they complain about the courses or teachers. And you just have to spend a few hours with teachers until they complain about the students or broader system.

University is broken, and everyone knows it. The only question now is finding a viable, "political cash flow positive" path, into something better.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli's full birth name is "Ciro Duran Santilli", with mother's last name "Duran" in the middle as per Brazilian tradition.

But Ciro's usage of "Duran" got gradually dropped to "Ciro Santilli", Ciro's official Italian name, as Ciro moved more and more definitively to Europe.

It can still however be seen in certain online places where Ciro didn't have the patience or power to change it e.g. some old École Polytechnique stuff: gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship

Also, don't have multiple names if you can avoid it, it is confusing!

medium.com/left-right/the-education-system-is-about-to-implode-5c95f774b523 The Education System is About to Implode by Nicholas Budny (2020)

The image of an university is basically their only real asset, which they extract money out of via undergraduate students in some countries like the USA, and by getting funding.

For this reason, universities will sacrifice basically any principle in order to give themselves a good image.

Although for profit companies also do this, it is simply on another level for universities.

This is the actual main function of university for many people as of the 2020s. And it fulfills it quite well. A breeding ground.

In a closely related sense, university is simply a symbol of personal status. Not a place where you go to learn. And especially in the Anglophone world of fancy colleges, university also doubles down as a form of long term luxury hotel. Even if it ends up meaning debt.

There's nothing wrong with sexual selection. This type of natural eugenics is an important part of humankind. It is however just sad that any type of learning falls so much behind. A close second would be fine. But as it stands, it is just too far off.

Related:

After learning this term, Ciro Santilli finally understood that his actual major was MR, and not bullshit like applied mathematics or control theory.

As of 2020s and much earlier, Ciro Santilli believes that undergrad studies were fundamentally broken (considering the Information Age which completely changed what would be possible) because university had only two goals, with the exception of a few enlightened professors:As a result, most students, who would not go on to do a PhD essentially do a simple trade: all their time, and possibly some money, in exchange for imbuing themselves with the incredible name of a respected institution so they can get better jobs later on.

Beauty, deep understanding, and learning awesome things comes basically as a second thought.

Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.

Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.

Basically all of this could be done online from books.

Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.

For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.

Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".

You can always learn pure theory later on for free or very cheap from books.

And above all, you can always learn software engineering later on for free, because the programming community is so much more open than any other so far, notably e.g. with Stack Overflow and GitHub, see also: Section "Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment". Ciro Santilli is trying to change that with OurBigBook.com, but don't hold your breath. But it is increasingly hard to understand why there isn't an university that forces teachers to publish all their notes and lecture videos (which should be mandatorily recorded) with a Creative Commons License, and then let anyone take whichever exams they want for a small fee or for free.

Actually, there is a good chance you will learn to program, like it or not, because chances are that you won't be able to find as decent a job doing anything else.

But there is one thing you cannot learn for free: laboratory work. Laboratory work is just too expensive to carry out outside of an institution.

Basically, if you don't do laboratory work in undergrad, you will very likely never be able to do so in your entire life.

Because laboratories are so rare and expensive, it is laboratories that put you in the best most unfair position at creating world changing deep tech startups, which is why when in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work. Yes, you won't be able to achieve those insanely concentrated equities of the early-Internet, as you will need more venture capital to run your company, but those days are over now, deal with it.

Ciro Santilli's general feeling is that university should not own IP, it should belong to the researchers. Instead, university should help researchers make their startups, so they can become big, and then we can tax them and reinvest in the universities.

Of course, this goes through the nonprofit impact measurement difficulty. Maybe we could instead limit the IP to some reasonably small percentage, like 10%?

But still, as of 2020, if feels like universities are way too greedy.

Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:

Existing lecture notes by students:

Lecture note upload website:

Exams uploads:

For a critique/history of this insanity, see also: Section "Colleges of the University of Oxford".

The general and ideal user acquisition is of course organic Googling:

However, before that point, it is very likely that Ciro will have to physically do some very hard and specific user acquisition work at some University. Maybe there is a more virtual way of achieving this.

This work will involve going through some open set of university lecture notes, and creating a superior version of them on OurBigBook.com, and somehow getting students to notice it and use it as a superior alternative to their crappy lecture notes.

Another very promising route is publishing the answers to old examination questions on the website. It is likely that we will be able to overcome any copyright issues by uploading only the answers to numbered questions. There is a minor risk that these would be considered derivative works of the copyrighted questions. But universities would have to be very anal to enforce a DMCA for that!!!

Getting in contact with students is an epic challenge, as an incredibly deep chasm separates us:

Walking with advertisement t-shirts mentioning specific course names in some university location is something Ciro seriously considers, that's how desperate things are. Watch out: docs.ourbigbook.com/#public-relations for T-shirt news!