Brains working towards machine consciousness

Perhaps these aren't definitions that everyone is used to using, so for the sake of clarity:

Training: equipping a student with skills so that they can perform a task/role, often through repetitive practice. "Training is the process of learning the skills that you need for a particular job or activity." (Google dictionary)

Teaching: Guiding a learner to acquire knowledge and skills so that they have a level of mastery of a subject. "Teaching is the work that a teacher does in helping students to learn" (Google dictionary)

Educating: Guide someone to learn how to learn for themselves.  "To educate people means to teach them better ways of doing something or a better way of living." (Google dictionary)

Assessment: A judgement about someone's ability. "An assessment is a consideration of someone or something and a judgment about them." (Google dictionary)

To my mind, Higher Education should be about educating people.  It should be about supporting them in their personal quest for further understanding, which should include subject knowledge and skills as well as being about learning how to learn.

Almost none of what happens at HE should be training, except where a practical skill is necessary in order to be able to undertake further exploration of a subject.  Also, very little should need to be taught, at least not in an instructional way.

My ideal would be to teach learners a range of ways to learn, and then provide them with the goals they need to achieve for accreditation (through assessment) and pointers to appropriate sources of learning material.  Provide ways for the learner to prove the level of understanding they have acquired, assess it, and provide them with feedback.

How much does that really cost to do?  If delivered using IT to provide the infrastructure, the main costs are in providing the initial teaching on how to learn, and in creating and assessing the evaluation opportunities.  The IT itself need not cost a great deal at all, and the systems used to support the learners are similarly inexpensive.

At the moment, UK HE students accrue debts of £3225 per annum for 120 points worth of assessed modules.  These are typically in 10 or 20 credit modules, and will involve about 4 assessed course works and 1 examination.  The numbers are obviously approximate, but this means there are roughly 9 lots of 5 assessments - let's call it 60 per year for a student, for the sake of argument (5 for each 10 credits in a 120 credit year).

Top up fees alone allow for a revenue of £53.75 per assessed piece of work, by these figures.  Assuming 50% of revenue is somehow eaten up in administration, this leaves about £27 per assessed piece of work.  It takes me about 2 hours to write an exam paper, and less to write a coursework (an hour, generally), and around 20 minutes to mark a complicated course work, and half and hour to mark a complicated exam script (I am being a bit generous here). For one student, then, this work would be the equivalent of earning about £3.43 per hour, but for a full time year of 35 hour weeks, 40 weeks of the year, it brings in around £19,000.  Not exactly competitive with HE rates, but with a few efficiency savings, this could be brought up to a reasonable level.  

The figures are 'worst case' as they stand, but do not include quality audits or determining a suitable curriculum.  Obviously, though, things are not quite as simple as this - we need to take proper account of the fact there will be some administrative costs, and quality checks.  

Essentially, though, it looks as though it should be feasible to provide an accreditation service for students to provide them with an independent view on whether the quality of their understanding matches against a set of criteria, for the same amount as they currently pay to universities, as long as they do not need to be directly taught the course content.