Ever since MIT made its curriculum freely available online, its philanthropic feat has become a global trend. Colleges compete to add new classes to the Web's ever-growing free catalog. The result is a world where content and credentials no longer need to come from the same source. A freshman at Podunk U. can study with the world's top professors on YouTube.I have nothing to disagree with the excerpt from this report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I have streamed in more than a couple of videos from the MIT site. One of those videos was Tom Friedman's talk at MIT on the "World is Flat"--it was the closest to having Friedman on campus to talk to my students. One of the students was so impressed with his talk that she said she even talked with her church pastor about Friedman's observations. (Elsewhere I have recorded my own reservations about Friedman and his penchant for metaphors, but that is not the focus of this blog!)
But, thanks to the Great Recession, OpenCourseWare is probably the last line item a resource-constrained university would pay for--after all, it means spending money on something that gets PR for the university but is to essentially hand things for free. The Chronicle adds:
"I think the economics of open courseware the way we've been doing it for the last almost decade have been sort of wrong," Mr. Wiley tells The Chronicle. Projects aimed for "the world," not bread-and-butter clientele like alumni and students. "Because it's not connected to any of our core constituencies, those programs haven't been funded with core funding. And so, in a climate where the economy gets bad and foundation funding slows, then that's a critical juncture for the movement."Yep, it is a dog-eat-dog world and, to paraphrase Norm from the TV show Cheers, OCW is wearing a milkbone underwear :-(
I think this is only a temporary setback, however. it is only a matter of time before we accept that forcing students to do time in a classroom does not necessarily mean that gain the desired competencies. On the other hand, a competency-based education means that it can be in any mode the students want, and at any pace the students desire. This stupid factory model of mass production will end soon, and I will celebrate like crazy :-) Finally:
Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
"And then, ultimately, I think there will be increasing opportunities in the digital space for certification as well," Mr. Carson says. "And that those three things will be able to be flexibly combined by savvy learners, to achieve their educational goals at relatively low cost."
And social life? Don't we need college to tailgate and mate?
"Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."
Let us go one additional step and clarify something here: it is NOT the role of a university to provide for social life for students. That is an awful waste of time and resources.
