There's a lot of recent talk about open access in academia - taxpayers fund the bulk of academia in modern times so there isn't much benefit to a billion-dollar corporation charging a subscription fee for science research produced there.

But the university system itself, awash in money, new buildings and new employees after two decades of 'a college education is a right' mentality propped up by unlimited student loans, needs a reboot too. There may be a Science 2.0 solution for that in the works.

Sebastian Thrun, Ph.D., Googler and teacher at Stanford (winner of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grand Challenge in 2005 and one of the brains behind Google Street View, among other Google X projects) may be trying to overturn the old way of teaching.

Thrun teaches a class on artificial intelligence with fellow Googler Peter Norvig and didn't like that he only reached 200 students so they put up a website offering an online version.  That went nowhere, as anyone who has tried to passively start a website has learned, but then he mentioned the website at a small conference and 80 people signed up, then he sent a note to an AI association and it suddenly had 14,000 signups. 

The next problem, he recounted to Andy Kessler of the Wall Street Journal, was Stanford University.

"I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said 'If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?' And I said: I. Don't. Care." 

His experiment reached 160,000 people and 23,000 finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 170 took it online - but on the exams the top 410 performers were remote online students, not Stanford high-paying ones. The first Stanford student score was at number 411 - still quite good out of 23,000 people but Stanford needn't be worrying about admissions from those 410 people they assumed were unqualified to have a certificate with their name on it.

Thrun estimated his cost was basically $1 per student per class. Obviously he is making an assumption, namely that the infrastructure at Stanford and his salary are free but even if the cost is $10 per student per class, that is 100 times cheaper than what education costs today.

Won't public school bureaucracies and teachers unions and universities and tenured professors go to war over these changes?  He had an answer for that too. "The dialogue always focuses on what's going to happen to the institutions. I'm totally siding with the students."