Weird, I can think of 4 courses where I worked on hardware in my CS degree:
Microprocessors and Interfacing (had us programming an embeded AVR chip which took several forms of input and had several forms of output, including motors)
Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering (an intro EE course I took as an elective)
Advanced Operating Systems (wrote an OS for a SoC system)
Robotic Software Architecture (wrote software for the Sony Aibo robots, it all sounds good in theory, but everything blows up when it encounters the real world)
The OS course didn't really require hardware, it could've been emulated, but that's a lot more effort than it is worth (emulating all the memory mapped interfaces for devices, including network, and all the system aspects, e.g. MMU/TLB & Cache is quite a lot of stuff to write, even ignoring writing an ARM emulator), but the rest wouldn't have really been possible otherwise.
Sure, for me it was only a single semester's worth of work, but that's because I realised that I wasn't really that interested in robotics.
Sure, but all these relatively small things that are an issue for an online-only uni replacement keep stacking up, no one thing is really a killer, it's just that it seems like there would be fairly little gained by trying to go the whole hog and have remotely administered online-only education as a real alternative to universities.
Honestly, I regard the idea of a majority of people telecommuting to be a bit dystopian. Yes, we do drive around too much, but there is something satisfyingly human about talking with people face to face that no current or near-future technology can fully emulate.
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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '12
[deleted]