Knowledge, interaction, communities, infrastructure, and facilities are all important.
Knowledge is a commodity, but that's been true since Gutenberg. It's just a little more true now. Unis could have mailed out videos of lectures in the past, for a relatively small fee.
Interaction and communities are important. I'm guessing that online 1:1 interaction is a lot weaker (though Skype could help a bit) because it's so slow. Online communities are better, as 1:N interactions can be more powerful. The question is, how important was one on one time with your lecturer? I'm guessing it wasn't a big part of your university time, unless you were doing a high level course. Too many students to lecturers.
Infrastructure and facilities (especially labs) ... except for online journal subscriptions these are getting pretty weak these days anyway. Old-timers love to gas on about the time they nearly blew up the chem lab, but I've never been allowed near the sort of things they were able to do. For some reason. People doing a big research project (on something that isn't just computational or theoretical) get a bit more play, but only on one machine.
In short, budget cuts and commercialization have killed most of what most universities have to offer anyway.
I'll try to simplify that. A good school should have:
mentors, peers, information, infrastructure.
Mentors - Intelligent people who guide you.
Peers - Friends and community to fulfill all kinds of human needs.
Information - The data that you must put into your head and the process designed to get it there.
Infrastructure - Equipment, tools, software, etc. Things you wouldn't have easy access to on your own.
I didn't get much one on one time with lecturers, and I'm an ambitious fool. I approached many, but I always felt like they were waiting for me to leave. I wasn't allowed to do anything in the labs except rush through some simple prewritten task. My peer group was great, and I do think that is one benefit of schools like this. They attract plenty of intelligent innocent young-ens and put them all in one place.
I would love to be a part of an online education community, I've actually just gotten really excited about that. Ideas brewing!
I was at a Polytechnic for my degree. It is pretty much a uni, just doesn't have the prestige. The lecturers are as good and have taught at universities in the past. I say this as I think they are often confused with community colleges in america. It was really good in that the classes were small (it ended up being 15 students in first year). We could even talk to our lecturers at lunchtime.
I felt free to listen in to my lecturer's discussions at lunchtime, or raise a topic of interest and discuss it with them. They also had real world experience which was great. For example: the head didn't have a degree in my field. It was in commerce, not Information Systems. The Information Systems part was from working in that field for years.
There is a place for completely studying solo, but meetups in physical space do allow people to innovate better (bouncing ideas off each other without impediment). Creating a study group with red_beard08, squizgirl77 and <some guy with a weird name> has a certain amount of artificialness to it. Perhaps due to not knowing them. Maybe social tools like twitter will help alleviate that.
Knowledge is a commodity, but that's been true since Gutenberg. It's just a little more true now. Unis could have mailed out videos of lectures in the past, for a relatively small fee.
Interaction and communities are important. I'm guessing that online 1:1 interaction is a lot weaker (though Skype could help a bit) because it's so slow. Online communities are better, as 1:N interactions can be more powerful. The question is, how important was one on one time with your lecturer? I'm guessing it wasn't a big part of your university time, unless you were doing a high level course. Too many students to lecturers.
Infrastructure and facilities (especially labs) ... except for online journal subscriptions these are getting pretty weak these days anyway. Old-timers love to gas on about the time they nearly blew up the chem lab, but I've never been allowed near the sort of things they were able to do. For some reason. People doing a big research project (on something that isn't just computational or theoretical) get a bit more play, but only on one machine.
In short, budget cuts and commercialization have killed most of what most universities have to offer anyway.