MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, have lately been promoted as the new phenomenon that is going to destroy the university system. Why will people pay for a university education, the line of reasoning goes, if they can get the same thing online for free? And given that college grads are having so much trouble getting jobs to pay off their loans, won’t people start seeing college as a bad investment?

As I’ve written before, I am not a fan of the “college for everyone” theory that has dominated American educational planning for the last generation. On a policy level, I think it’s shortsighted to think that we’d want a country where everyone was college-educated, or that it was even feasible. On a personal level, college education simply doesn’t suit everyone. All of us have our own individual paths in life, and sometimes a college education does not lead in the direction we need to go. I think that pushing more and more kids into college as the default option after high school has degraded the quality of our universities and led to less respect for all the important and valuable pursuits for which college is not a prerequisite.

As a homeschooler, however, I do think that MOOCs are a welcome new addition to the options for learning outside of structured environments, and I love the idea that the breadth of human knowledge is being made available to everyone, everywhere.

But will MOOCs make the whole idea of the university education obsolete?

I don’t think so, but I do think that they will change the way we view self-education, and their use will drive what incoming college students will expect to get for their investment of money and time.

What do MOOCs do well?

MOOCs provide access to information and current ways of analyzing and presenting it. They provide connections between professors who once were perched on a pedestal to the rest of the world. They allow students who formerly were cut off from college–by geography, money, or life experiences—the ability to access some of the teaching they would have otherwise missed. MOOCs allow people to continue their education or just to fill in areas of interest. They also allow the students to access to help and ideas from fellow students around the world.

What do universities do well?

When the right students attend them (see my note above about “college for everyone”), universities are places that bring together advanced thinkers with less-educated people who want to advance their knowledge and skills. An optimal undergraduate experience is one in which the student’s perspectives get broadened and they are introduced to new ideas and ways of thinking. And this happens largely because of the new environment, being able to work directly with professors, and hanging out with other students who are going through the same transformation. The other thing that universities offer is a place for the highly educated to work together, exchanging ideas and research. Sometimes this part of the university life seems inaccessible to lower-level students, but usually they are worked in to the process, especially if they are in a field that mostly happens in the university environment. Lastly, universities provide an all-important networking opportunity. Future entrepreneurs find each other, future political leaders develop their skills together, and—I won’t deny that this is important—future best friends and spouses meet each other.

So if MOOCs won’t kill universities, what will they do?

First, a caveat: I do think that MOOCs may end up changing education as we know it at community colleges and lower level universities. Already, what with the recession and the sudden availability of free education, they are feeling the pinch. Some of these colleges are already doing what I expect all of them will eventually do: using MOOCs to provide part of the education that they offer their students. [See how San Jose State is doing this.] Other lower level colleges are just going to fail to attract enough students to remain viable, especially for-profit colleges which often prey on their students rather than educate them.

But I believe that MOOCs will never be able to provide the benefits that an in-person degree at a good university can provide:

• Working directly with the best thinkers in your field
• Developing mentoring relationships with professors or more experienced students
• Learning from, helping, and arguing with your fellow students
• Creating the sorts of connections that in some fields are absolutely necessary for success
• Having guidance in honing your analytical skills in ways that can’t be done alone

What bothers me is not that people are excited about online learning (so am I) or that people think it has some benefits over traditional college (it does), but that everyone is so happily throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional college is still going to be the best choice for people who should have been there to begin with.

So will MOOCs destroy education as we know it?

No, but they are a welcome addition to the tools available for self-education and advancement.

See related: Helping teens get the most from MOOCs

For many years, the word “tracking” has been taboo in American education. The general consensus has been that separating the “Bluebirds” from the “Meadowlarks” imposes a class system in the classroom. Everyone points out that kids know what the groups are, whether or not euphemisms are used: the smart kids and the stupid kids. The rich kids and the poor kids. The white kids and the black kids.

But recently, lots of people—including pretty much everyone who advocates for gifted education—have been revisiting the idea of ability grouping. The writer of Should it be OK to place students in ability groups? points out that ability grouping today doesn’t have to be what it was in the past. I agree—as always, I think that the best education is the most flexible.

My son was in a public charter school for first and second grade where he was in a mixed-grade classroom. This type of classroom is definitely harder for the teacher—she could never just relax and give all the kids the same assignments. The great thing about it was that because all the kids started the year knowing that they were at different levels, there was no animosity to being put into separate groups based on their abilities.

At the beginning of the first year, my son was a novice reader. By the middle of that year, he was reading Harry Potter. As a novice reader, he really appreciated the fact that the teacher read aloud (to all the students, reading and pre-reading) and that he was never made to feel like there was something “wrong” with him because he couldn’t read. As an advanced reader only a short time later, he was thrilled to be put with the more advanced readers so that they could read a book together that challenged and interested them.

Because being at different levels was a reality in the classroom, there was never any idea that a) the kids in the advanced group were better in any way, or b) that kids were destined to stay in the group they were in. Most of the first graders were reading an easy book for their reading group, but none of them assumed that they’d still be in that group by third grade. That idea wouldn’t make sense.

This is where traditional schooling ideas clash with the reality of what’s good for kids’ education: Most kids in our country are age-segregated, making fluid ability-grouping harder. When you do leveled reading groups in segregated classes, there’s a much higher possibility that the students are going to see the grouping as “tracking”—sticking them in with the slow kids or the smart kids “forever.”

Although I agree that this is a problem, I don’t agree that because this is a problem, there should be no ability grouping. Kids who are voracious readers when young shouldn’t be tortured into reading JEasy books because it makes their classmates feel better. This is simply not a choice that is any fairer than making slower readers feel dumb.

So how can a traditional school fulfill the needs of its different readers? First of all, the teachers can work hard not to convey even a hint that slower readers are in any way “less smart” than their fast-reading compadres. Any adult can tell you that the age at which they learned to read had no bearing on whether they became a functional, successful adult. But adults who were made to feel stupid because they didn’t learn to read on someone else’s schedule can certainly tell you that they felt the attitude of the teacher, which bled over into the students and their parents. Everyone knew who the “stupid kids” were.

The next thing teachers can do is to construct more fluid classrooms. If they do ability grouping for reading, they could make sure to mix the groups up for an activity that doesn’t need to be differentiated, or is in some way naturally differentiated. For example, elementary school science projects can involve kids of different levels if the project is open-ended enough so that the more advanced students are able to — and encouraged to — do more.

Another thing the teacher can do is to devote some time each day to reading out loud. This allows the children who are still stuck in stiflingly boring leveled readers to hear good writing and good stories. (Now, we could also argue about using stiflingly boring leveled readers at all, but that’s another argument altogether.) I have actually never been with a group of students of any age who didn’t appreciate a good book read out loud, but teachers often leave reading out loud for kindergarten only, as if they’d never heard of the bustling market for audiobooks for adults. On top of that, if teachers encouraged students to write in their notebooks or doodle during reading out loud time, the kids who need to fidget would get as much out of it as the kids who need to need to keep their brains busy.

Finally, ability grouping works best when the schools themselves are more fluid. For some reason, it’s assumed that younger kids can’t deal with more fluid classrooms, moving from one space to another or in with different groups of children. But of course they can—we already stigmatize the gifted kids and the kids who are behind in some subject areas by doing “pull-out” programs. So what if every student were in a pull-out program? Ability grouping doesn’t have to stop at separating out only the outliers.

This article in Education Week sums up the pro’s and con’s of ability grouping. “Emerging research suggests that, in some cases, flexible ability grouping can in fact benefit students.”

The key here is flexible: All children’s needs can be served as long as the system is flexible enough to accommodate those needs. The past bad reputation that ability grouping got was because of its inflexibility: it was used to track low-performing students permanently into another educational sub-class. But that is not a permanent feature of ability grouping, but rather a predictable result of inflexible education.

Last year, as San Francisco’s wonderful science museum, the Exploratorium, was preparing to move to their new space, a friend and I exchanged dire predictions. The Exploratorium has long been a favorite of science-loving families. In their funky cavern of a museum they made it cool to be inquisitive and exciting to take part in activities that might be deemed boring or just plain gross in the wider world. But as they started to promote the move to Pier 15—just down the line from the very stupidest part of San Francisco (as in, the part where all the tourists go)—longtime fans got worried.

Would they fall victim to the “pretty but vacant” revamp of the Academy of Sciences?

Would they become yet another “children’s museum” that presents cool activities but with all the science stripped out of it?

Would they cater to the quick-stop tourist who’d want to be entertained with trite and shallow content?

I decided I would keep my membership for one reason: So we could attend the members-only preview which was held Saturday.

I forgot my phone, so I don’t have a lot of photos. This is the Bay Observatory with the map tables in the foreground.

I’m pleased to let you know that none of our dire predictions came true, and there are many charming surprises to be had at the new Exploratorium. First, the location: Yes, it’s right down the street from the part of San Francisco no local wants to be found dead in, but it’s much more accessible to both out-of-towners and car-free city dwellers. The new site is as different from the old as possible: light and airy, part of the general bustle of the waterfront, the sort of place someone could wander into and be totally taken by surprise. There is more floor space and the elongated layout makes a visit there like a stroll through the history and future of science.

“This is like a Lamborghini versus a Volkswagen…that’s missing a cylinder,” says Chuck Mignacco, Building Operations Manager, in a video on their website. The new building is a “net zero” building that uses no fossil fuels in heating or cooling.

Many of the Exploratorium’s best features made the move intact. My daughter, of course, was thrilled to see the toilet drinking fountain right in the first lobby. Oldie-but-goody displays were scattered throughout, some updated but all with a new sheen in their new location. Like the old Exploratorium, the workshops and labs are open for view, but now they seem more accessible, more a part of what’s going on.

The new building is bigger, and they have started to make use of the space in true Exploratorium fashion. Another museum might have a slice of a large redwood trunk on display; the Exploratorium has much of the lower part of an enormous tree, including the root ball. My very favorite part of the museum is all new: the Bay Observatory. This is a lovely room upstairs that opens to a courtyard overlooking the Bay with gorgeous views of the Bay Bridge. A couple of large tables hold piles of facsimiles of old maps of California. We spent a good amount of time shuffling through the maps and talking about California past and present. The other side of the room presents a view of the Bay through displays and interactive exhibits (some of them still not finished).

This mix of old and new continued to surprise us right until the end. My daughter noticed the old “tornado maker” which we had somehow missed when we went back downstairs. She positively dragged me back up to see it, though I’d seen it enough times to know that there was no point in making a special trip for it. But right next to it was an exhibit we’d never seen before. Though she was momentarily thrilled to see her old tornado friend, our attention was grabbed for some time by the “Arp” shape maker, a device containing a pan of “oobleck” (cornstarch and water). When the pan is jiggled vigorously, the non-Newtonian fluid in the pan rises up in fascinating sculptures reminiscent of the work of Jean Arp. (By the way, if you don’t know oobleck, here is my daughter’s favorite oobleck video!)

In our two-and-a-half hours at the new building, we didn’t have enough time to see half of what’s there. But what we did see was a great taste of what’s to come—we’ll definitely be going back.