The modern hippie mother on Gossip Girl this week, who cares more about solar panels, unions and co-ops than her daughter’s private college education, repeatedly announced that “knowledge shouldn’t be for sale.”
MIT OpenCourseWare agrees with her. We have discussed how computer tools and TEAL can increase the customization and one-on-one learning possibilities of teacher to student, but another important possibility of digital media and web resources for education is the drastically lower cost and the ability for one teacher to teach millions at once through broadcasting knowledge and courses through the internet. For public schools cost is not an issue from kindergarten up until high school, but once you get into the undergraduate and graduate levels, cost can frequently determine what school you will go to, and then what profession you will go into afterwards in order to pay back your loans.
When most people think of the free university offerings the first thing that comes to mind is iTunes U "the world’s greatest collection of free educational media... with over 200,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement." But compared to MIT, iTunes U was late into the game (launched May 30, 2007). In 2000, MIT decided to publish their material online and make it widely available for free in order "to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware." This was controversial, many professors felt that they were giving away their "intellectual property" to the world for free. vs. those that felt this was an incredible social good (MIT OpenCourseWare).
MIT's OpenCourseWare includes syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams, and over 1,000 hours of lecture videos for nearly all graduate and undergraduate courses at MIT. 35 million people have used the courses (14 million of which used it in translated languages), from 220 countries around the globe. The program was launched in 2001 and today there are almost 2,000 courses online. The social good is obvious: 35 million people learning more to help them with their fields, and outside of their fields, teachers learning lessons from other teachers, students exploring new subjects to help them decide what they want to study, and much more. It is also helpful for schools with much fewer resources, for example schools in Africa, with very low budgets that can't afford textbooks, but with MIT OCW they can get a host of assignments and curricula that was never before available.
Once you don't have to aggregate a teacher with several students in a room, the costs drop tremendously. "Forcing people to aggregate is a massive cost inefficiency that people will quickly grow tired of bearing when they realize other options are available...Teachers could scale via podcasting... one great podcast of just ten minutes can equate to thousands of hours of learning as subscribers all over the world automatically receive these recording without lifting a finger
(VentureBeat: Web technology is about to change how we learn).
Providing knowledge for free has wonderful social benefits, but knowledge and universities are not the same thing. If the knowledge continues to be given away for free, or people begin to believe that what is provided by universities should be free (like online news), will universities go the way of journalism? Oh lord, I hope not. They are the centers of much scientific and social research that benefits the world. The fact that the tuitions of thousands of students pay for the greatest professors and grad students to do this research is a necessary benefit for all. This pooling of resources is needed in order for very expensive research to be done. While Wikipedia may work because no one needs to be an expert in order to accomplish a great deal, to discover "pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos" (Nobel Physics Prize 2002) requires great professors from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tokyo, and Associated Universities Inc. of Washington, DC who are given the financial and academic (and grad student) resources needed to research and experiment. Try working on cosmic neutrinos from your wiki or blog. If people do feel that the tuition is too high, and that they can get for free on the internet what someone would have to pay $45,000 to get from MIT, I hope that a new financial model will evolve that will continue to provide for the continuing study and research that come from universities.
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I agree tha knowledge is not the same as a university. What universities have the ability to do, that which online learning lacks, is the ability to bring people together so that they can socialize. This is an important part of learning that you cannot put in a podcast or a book.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your opinion, however, that people should continue to go to college to fund research. Having people pay astronomical rates for an education just so that the university can fund research into which said people have no choice is wrong.
Thanks for your comments Alison. There are some knowledge areas that won't be supported by private corporations, because the profit is too far away or nonmonetary, and cannot be supported by government because of politics and inefficiencies. This is, for now, where the world of non-profit private universities can be leaders, with their resources, faculty, as well as have the students who can help contribute to the creation knowledge. But it is unfair that undergraduates subsidize it; and it won't last if universities cannot compete with other cheaper forms of education.
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