This is something that I have been thinking about the last few days, and thought a little discussion would help me come to a conclusion.
With sites such as Khan Academy and Coursera popping up in the last few years, teaching yourself a concept or topic is becoming easier and easier. These sites, in addition to the communities that spring up around and for them, seem to make attending an actual class obsolete. The way I think of it is the video or lesson is analogous to a teacher, while forum posts or discussions about said topics are like the classmates. This seems to be an effective system, and it makes one wonder if there are any advantages that actual classes (i.e. in a classroom setting) have over these new online lessons.
One obvious advantage brick and mortar schools have is their access to resources. In many classes, especially science classes, lab activities are vital to understanding a concept. I can't see any way that online lessons can offer these opportunities short of each person buying the equipment themselves. Clearly this is unrealistic. Another advantage that I thought of was ready access to a teacher or expert on the subject. While internet forums often provide a means of communication with experts in a field, this is not always the case. In an actual school, the teacher or professor is usually available for students to ask questions.
The question I am left with is this; Can one teach themselves online to the same level of proficiency that they would have if they were to have taken a course at a university?
I think that you can teach yourself a subject quite well from the internet, videos, etc. I do not believe that you can reach mastery in a subject though. This is because there are a couple of things missing. First off, I believe that by teaching yourself and not having interactions with professors you might miss patterns that develop in a subject, or other aspects that are more intuitive than anything else. Second, you won't receive criticism on your studies that might help you look at a problem in a different light, or change your routine for solving a problem to a more efficient one.
I agree with you on the first point, but I think that what you describe in your second point can still be found online. If one were to post in a forum relevant to the subject being studied, it is likely that you will receive responses that show you a different method of solving a problem. The people responding will most likely have received some type of education in the subject, so the information that they are passing along is quality information, albeit second hand information.
I do suppose you are right that anyone can claim they are an expert online. However, in certain areas such as math or (some) sciences, this claim is verifiable by seeing if what they said works out! Sometimes it just takes someone pointing something out to make things click, and in reality that person need not be an expert.
Maybe a different perspective might help. I've been playing guitar for 4 years and although I am tough on myself, people tell me I'm proficient. I am purely self-taught, but I feel that if I had a teacher, it would've been a lot easier and quicker to get to where I am today. With that in mind, I do feel people can reach proficiency, but not mastery, as mastery may require more than 1 perspective. There are things you learn in person that you just cannot correlate or comprehend when using videos.
I always wonder whether doing courses online is faster or shorter than doing them with a good teacher. I find myself able to learn things faster when there is no one "above" me, but I typically don't learn as well. The quality vs. time might be the distinguishing factor.
Educators need to be paid for there to be some incentive for them to make themselves available to learners. What you're getting at here is interaction. Browsing stackexchange isn't going to help me to give me as much of an insight on a very difficult problem as having my question, with all its peculiarities, answered directly. And it's only the very difficult problems that help my knowledge and experience to grow.While Internet forums often provide a means of communication with experts in a field, this is not always the case
While educators do require an incentive, this is not necessarily the case for just experts in the field. There are numerous sites I can go to and converse directly with people who have PhDs or other education in the relevant subject matter. Of course, just because they are knowledgeable with the subject does not imply that they will be good at explaining it, so there is definitely a trade off. I think it would be accurate to say that as the difficulty of the subject increases, the need for a educator at hand increases. It is easy to teach yourself, say, calculus online, but more advanced maths such as topology require a teacher. The question now becomes- are these more advanced topics harder to teach yourself due to difficulty or due to lack of online resources?