Demand for online grows, but supply shrinks? Depressing!

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.

Online courses and intellectual property

Almost two years ago (November 11, 2006), I emailed the president of the faculty union in response to a call to boycott expanding online classes. I have no idea whether the administration and the union have figured out anything more on this. Here is most of that email:

... regarding online classes and intellectual property issues, I would argue that course materials belong in the intellectual commons, and not behind walls that prevent access.

Over the past few years, I have been impressed with two important approaches in particular:
1. The idea of "Creative Commons" that Lawrence Lessig champions.
2. MIT's venture into "opencourseware".

I am not sure if it was Lessig who started Creative Commons, but it was from one of his talks a few years ago that I became aware of it. (More info at http://creativecommons.org/)
This approach appeals to me because I think the more we make ideas available for everybody, the more humans progress. I don't think that all our progress has come out of material incentives alone, which is what complex intellectual property rights
regimens attempt to do.

A similar, and in fact related, venture is MIT's OpenCourseWare. (More info at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html)
When it was launched I remember thinking, hey, this is why the Web is fantastic: we can easily makes things available for free and easy access to people wherever they might be. This is all the more the case when it comes to distributing knowledge to people in resource-constrained countries, which are quite a few in this world.

MIT's approach has catalyzed the development of the "Opencourseware Consortium". (More info at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/) It has now become a world-wide effort to pool together the academic knowledge.

Even at a personal level, most of the stuff I do I post them online. (For that matter, even my work reports are online: http://www.wou.edu/~khes/personal/workreports.htm)
I maintain webpages for the courses I teach and none is password protected. If anybody finds it worthwhile to use it, why not? Every once in a while I get an email from some faculty member somewhere in the world who wants to use some PowerPoint file. Of course, I reply that they can use it. For my classes too I scan for insights from other faculty. Many days in the summer I spend re-educating myself about the courses I am scheduled to teach by simply browsing through the syllabi
on the Web.

... I also hope that the union would urge the OUS campuses to join the OpenCourseware Consortium, if a campus is already not a member.