Open Source Education
POSTED IN: Blog Posts, Culture, Makes You Think
According to a recent Fast Company article, our higher educational systems are the latest in a line of systems that must “adapt or die” preceded by newspapers, television and record labels.
We’re standing on the cusp of incredible changes in the current higher education model. Today, “open content” is the biggest front of innovation in higher education. The movement that started at MIT has spread to more than 200 institutions in 32 countries that have posted courses online at the OpenCourseWare Consortium. YouTube Edu and iTunes U even stepped into the game making video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free.
The Edupunk Revolution
Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it, coined the term “edupunk” on his blog. An edupunk, according to Groom, “is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission.”
Many education 2.0 experts predict that traditional universities that cling to the traditional educational model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores.
“If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020.”
Professor David Wiley
Brigham Young University
Open Content Textbooks
I’m currently taking several college classes online right now. Tell me I’m not the only one who has seen the irony of taking a class online but still having to shell out hundreds of dollars for print course books.
Professor David Wiley, through his organization Flat World Knowledge, is attacking another problem area in today’s educational system: the lack of flexibility and high cost associated with textbooks. They’re building up a virtual library of open-content textbooks that are accessible online for free or in print for a fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks.
The challenge today is not to bring technology into the classroom, Wiley points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have already done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.
“Why is it that my kid can’t take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can’t we put 130 of those together and make it a degree?” Wiley asks. “There are all these kinds of innovations waiting to happen. A sufficient infrastructure of freely available content is step one in a much longer endgame that transforms everything we know about higher education.”
What do you think?
College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation’s students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. The United States was once the world’s most educated country. Today we rank 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees.
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September 16, 2009
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I see schools adapting fairly quickly to newer education models. And this comes from me selling technology to schools. The students are on board.
Where a big challenge lies is in that the parents are much of the time not on board or the funding is limiting proper execution. Parents not on board hurts kids a ton because most of a child’s education does not happen in the classroom. It happens at home in the form of follow up to what was learned in the classroom. If mom and dad cannot handle the tech run, it is hard to push their kids forward.
From a funding standpoint, pushing forward is a joke. Limited funds=limited tech initiatives.
No excuses from a University standpoint. They are the mountain top of waste and with a little restructuring could cure this. Heck, stop paying your football coaches 6 million a year and you build one heck of a computer lab.
Finally, we have to all remember one thing. 30% of kids learn by reading, roughly 30% by seeing and the remainder by writing or doing. Technology falls under seeing so we have to be careful not to leave 70% of our kids out.
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September 16, 2009
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and by the way Brad…really good piece!
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September 16, 2009
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Thanks bro. Great comments.
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September 16, 2009
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Great post Brad. I’ve been having this dialog with people for years, but never from a technology front until I saw a recent post from Seth Godin on this very subject. At what point is the market for a college education simply going to outpace itself? At the rate of tuition increase, the cost of a college diploma is going to eventually surpass the benefit of it, don’t you think?
But now with all the technological advancements, the question really has turned away from “will the market break,” to “how soon will it break” and what technological breakthrough will finally do it in?
The music industry is dying as songs have become commodities. The same has to be said for education. The easier it is to get your hands on information, the less value I’m going to be willing to pay someone for access to it.
As a father of 3 kids, I’m hopeful we see dramatic drops in the ridiculous cost of higher education…hopefully by 2017, the first year of college for my oldest.
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September 17, 2009
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Having been in college for seven years (ha ha!), I can honestly say that colleges are trying to adapt, but they can only do so much.
It would be nice to move away from textbooks in their current form and move towards developing software instead. I hate reading books on screens, it just doesn’t have the same feeling for me. But, if they make it interactive, allow me to highlight and take notes, and use multi-media, I think it would be very beneficial. PLUS, think of all the trees we’d save because professors are always wanting students to “pony-up” for the next edition when nothing was wrong with the old edition.
Having a lot of family in education, I can tell you that educators are always looking for ways to improve the classroom and learning experience. Technology isn’t the end-all be-all of that, but it is definitely an EXCELLENT tool.
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October 7, 2009
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No doubts that one applying for loans will receive more opportunities to get education