Courtesy of lisa_funtime
Free education? I’m not referring to grants or scholarships. I’m talking about a change in the way we acquire marketable knowledge and skills. Could there really be such a thing as free education?
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has made essentially all its course content available in a free, web-based format. Tag line: “Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.” Other institutions are offering similar content and services. Are there any drawbacks? In the current environment, yes. There isn’t an accepted accreditation model for this mode of free learning. How do you prove the knowledge and skills you learn from non-traditional sources?
Harold Jarche broached this topic a few weeks ago at AcademicInfo, citing George Siemens. He identifies three components of free, web-based education:
1) Content
There is a wealth of educational content online, and it increases every day. In addition to well-funded educational portals like MIT’s OpenCourseware, there are countless smaller-scale opportunities. A few quick searches of Ning, for example, revealed communities for learning everything from gardening and automotive repair to javascript and Web 2.0 tools.
2) Connections
How to find this free learning content? Harold states:
“It is also getting easier to connect and have conversations from micro-blogging to collaborative web spaces. No longer are learners confined within their LMS. Social networks like Facebook and Linked-In are being used by people to connect and learn, and user-defined spaces on Ning or Grou.ps allow anyone to start a community space for free.”
3) Accreditation
Free content. Check. Connections for locating free content. Check. Accreditation… The missing component.
Without some form of accreditation to prove competency, traditional colleges and universities will likely continue to be king of the learning hill. However, I don’t expect this barrier to remain intact for long. With the wealth of information on the Internet growing exponentially every year and the creative ways of harnessing this wealth also gaining steam, why should we pay tens of thousands of dollars for inconvenient schooling over the course of our lifetime?
Harold offered the following example while musing on this topic:
“Now what would happen if an applicant arrived with a certification from the web showing specific skills such as an ability to get published on a respected online journal or a blog with a readership in the thousands? Will the market accept these as readily as a degree from a journalism school?”
Good food for thought.
On a related note, Tom Haskins, in an article titled Goodbye college diplomas, lists the reasons he thinks college degrees will be worthless in the next ten years or so.
TrainingZone.co.uk recently published an interview with Jay Cross that adds some simple truths to this discussion as well. Here’s a brief passage:
Cross says: “The question is not; which course do I go on? But of all the many options for learning, which one do I choose : do I work with an expert, do I want to find it on Google or talk to my friends in the pub, or social network? These are all valid ways of learning.”
According to Cross, the power of Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks is that people learn as they would through natural conversation and dialogue. This democratisation of learning does mean a perceived loss of control by those who control the training purse strings. Cross finds that many businesses are nervous about the power of informal learning. As he says: “I’ve been talking to a group of senior corporate executives who were worried about informal learning styles.’Does it work?’ they ask. ‘Of course it does, how did you learn to talk, eat or walk’.”
In my opinion, this trend toward free education is likely to be driven by learning professionals. Those that are passionate about learning will always find ways to continue their own education. Not many people can shell out boat loads of cash over the decades to further their educational pursuits – especially when it means attending traditional universities whose schedules are rigid and disruptive to everyday life. The emergence of online, collaborative forums are likely to escalate.
Education is just as important as it ever was. The mode of acquiring education is changing. How will traditional colleges and universities respond? How will the work place respond?
I expect colleges to respond to the threat of free content and informal credentials by only “trying harder”, not “trying smarter”. This means they will add more computer labs, more bandwidth to campus-wide online connectivity, more online courses that resemble classroom experiences, and more justifications for the superiority of their accredited degree programs. If they were to disrupt their model of delivering lectures, labs and assignments via approved faculty members, there would be no reason to exist other than their research and collegial interactions among faculty which are already thriving. They have to keep up the appearances of delivering quality educational experiences to avoid the devastating questions about the sanity of cramming a baccalaureate education into four years with obsolete textbooks and passive modes of learning.
I suspect workplaces will respond more gracefully. College diplomas and transcripts are poor predictors of job performance. Recruiters would already jump at opportunities to see that employment candidates can do, deliver and fix. I’m optimistic that our transition from a printed word tradition to an oral, narrative and experiential culture will provide a new vocabulary for demonstrating qualifications for employment. Younger generations will naturally approach “job interviews” as games to play, conversations to join and places to upload some of their own self-generated content. That will give the recruiters a better handle a prospect’s future performance, reliability and growth potential.
BTW, Thanks for the mention, David.
By: Tom Haskins on December 1, 2008
at 5:31 pm
Thank you for adding to the discussion, Tom! Valuable insight.
By: learningjourneys on December 1, 2008
at 8:51 pm
David, sounds suspiciously like the “Day of the Long Tail” has arrived in education, too!
By: Eric Wilbanks on December 3, 2008
at 11:40 am
I just watched “Day of the Long Tail” on YouTube. Very interesting. I hadn’t heard of it before, but, yes, I think you are right, Eric. The “Day of the Long Tail” has arrived in education, too – or will soon.
By: learningjourneys on December 3, 2008
at 10:54 pm