Better Than Everyone, University Edition
21st April 2012
Seth Godin recently mentioned something that Clay Shirky has said about the television industry: Forty years ago, you only had to be better than two other shows. Now you have to better than everybody.
The winner-take-all society …
Big-name schools like MIT and Harvard have made full courses, and even suites of courses, available on-line. One of my more experienced colleagues began to get antsy when this process picked up speed a few years ago. Who wouldn’t prefer MIT’s artificial intelligence course over ours? These courses weren’t yet available for credit, which left us with hope. We offer our course as part of a coherent program of study that leads to a credential that students and employers value. But in time…
… comes to education.
The Khan Academy offerings are significant here.
It’s no longer enough to be the best teaching university in your state or neighborhood. Now you have to better than everybody. If you are a computer science department, that seems an insurmountable task. Maybe you can be better than Illinois-Springfield (and maybe not!), but how can you be better than Stanford, MIT, and Harvard?
What gets learned is going to depend far more on how good the student is than on how good the school is, because students will have easy access to the best schools in the world, and the quality of the school ceases to be a meaningful constraint.
How will that affect ‘credentialing’? If everybody can take a course at MIT, how do you decide who gets an MIT degree? Will the Educational Testing Service branch out into degree examinations leading to something like the GED? (Probably, since the SAT and ACT won’t be needed to take courses online.) Certainly MIT and Wide Spot Community College differ in their teacher quality, but when degrees will be based on examination results, will the one be able to convince us that it can make a better degree examination than the other? Will world-famous universities start ‘franchises’ like KFC, with local offices to administer exams and grant degrees?
April 21st, 2012 at 09:17
Some of those courses are well beyond the competence of the average college student. One can’t simply substitute MIT’s calculus course for the local community college’s course.
April 21st, 2012 at 10:56
And of course the online information will not be free. As with today’s school model, those who can afford the best education–and have the wherewithal intellectually to benefit from it–will have access. The poor, no matter how brilliant, will not. Good thing? Bad thing? Hypothesis non fingo.
As the New Flat Earth grows in cyberspace, many local institutions will cease to exist–libraries, retailers, banks, etc. Anything which can be done online will be done online because it’s cheaper, faster, and you can get better quality (at least in information). Schools will not be exempt.
April 21st, 2012 at 13:50
Dennis,
In general, knowledge IS free, or near enough so as to be effectively free. If you were so inclined, I bet you could go and sit in for many of MIT’s classes and suck up all the knowledge and instruction and nobody would ever know, question you, or care. I say this as someone who has experience teaching college courses, although I now work in industry.
What is expensive is credit and affiliation.
April 23rd, 2012 at 11:15
Someone once said, “Education is the only thing people are willing to pay for and not get.” Having taught at several colleges, I finally understand why.
They aren’t paying for education. Education is available for free on the Internet or in the public library. They are paying for a credential.
Oh, certainly some people want to learn more, and go to a school that they believe excels at teaching. But anybody who ever took a class he didn’t want because it was a degree requirement has thereby admitted he was also buying the credential. (I teach statistics in MBA programs; I am not unsure about this.)
But for a lot of students, or rather, for a lot of people enrolled in university courses, education is not part of the product; it’s part of the price. The cost they have to pay is a certain amount of money, plus a certain amount of time in the form of learning stuff. And like any competent consumers, they are trying to pay the minimum price.