Open up education? Money underneath.

There's a very interesting article recently posted on the BBC site about top US Universities throwing some money (and I mean a lot) behind some new education delivery platforms; Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have launched a $60M platform edX, and Stanford and others are behind Coursera.


This makes me happy. But some parts of the article give me pause for thought. Forgive the following brain dump style - I just wanted to get this stuff down.

Open education.

There is a fair bit about open education; freely available courses for all, providing education for the masses at little to no cost. This is laudable, and I fully support it, but surely we have to pay the money to the educators for their expertise, at least up front? At some point has there to be financial reward for those who deliver the teaching material? Certainly in this capitalistic society there simply has to be... without it I can't see us progressing our level of societal achievement much further. And how to we improve the value of the educational material if there is no reward for doing so? Are we to simply plateaux into a stable educational level with no desire to progress research? Maybe there is a fundamental requirement here to split research away from teaching; to advance our knowledge through a scientific / research community, and to disperse the resultant knowledge via a separate teaching community. But they must learn first, right? Who teaches the teachers?


The above thinking leads me to think that we could be heading for a world in which there are two distinct classes: educated and e-educated. The former would be the leaders in thinking, those that set the agendas, whilst the latter become self-driven entrepreneurs of learning. Those that can't be bothered won't, and maybe that gives us the third class - the great un-educated. Whilst I grant that making courses available for all for free is great - it will raise the educated level of those that want to be in the middle educational class - does it actually change anything? Probably the answer is yes - with greater knowledge an individual can make more informed decisions, and can innovate and drive things forward for themselves, and this is a good thing. But this can never be a one size fits all situation.

Proof of ID? Maybe not...

So the afore mentioned article also notes that the courses available online are not supported by any recognised qualification. Ostensibly this could be down to an inability to prove 'who is taking the test', but I think there is more behind this. Freely available educational material is not being made open for the benefit of mankind - it is there to market the individuals and establishments who are offering it. I believe this is a marketing strategy. By making quality material available to all, an institution (or individual lecturer) is increasing awareness of their brand. They are putting their name into the classrooms of the world, and are bringing their philanthropic good will to all who will listen. 


Call me cynical, but I don't see good will behind this. I see opportunities for growth. With money firmly in the mix. And more so I can't see how it will work otherwise, unless our society suddenly realises the inherent problems of capitalism and becomes a loving happy tree hugging place.

Postscript to

What I actually wanted to write about was the possibilities presented by facebook's emerging single-sign-on model for the world to digital ID within an elearning context, but I appear to have sidetracked myself. Ah well.