As you’ve probably figured out by now, I am an avid Seth Godin reader–his blog, his books, basically whatever I can get my hands. So it won’t surprise you when I have a response to one of his ideas. Today’s blog post is no different:
In his post, Godin postulates there are now three choices for higher education:
1. Scarce or abundant?
2. Free or expensive?
3. Be about school or about learning?
Godin is arguing that higher education will be turned on its head by the availability of open courseware, information in places like Wikipedia, and the notion that school is not needed. Part of me thinks he might be right.
I think, however, that Godin is missing part of the bigger picture. The higher education community hasn’t created the “scarcity” of degrees and accreditation for their own devices (though admittedly, some universities certainly make it seem so). Industries have made them a requirement for many positions. Most notably, medicine.
For such a demanding profession, I’d personally prefer that my doctor has some sort of third-party recognition of competence. Am I right?
I agree with Godin that there will be many experiments as to how to best present education and learning opportunities, particularly as the internet becomes more and more pervasive and accessible.
My opinion is that for education to stick (regardless of how it’s delivered), there needs to be some semblance of stakes involved. My experience at WGU has told me that those who have no stake in the process are most likely to fail–in fact, we’ve found that students who are on full scholarship don’t retain as well as students that have a partial scholarship and have to pay some tuition out of pocket. With raised stakes comes better performance.
So that’s the part of the conversation Godin forgot. How higher education changes depends on how the stakes change in the acquisition of learning and schooling (or whatever combination gives the best results). Will opencourseware really change the way education is delivered? Will Wikipedia (which is the ultimate in revisionist history) change education? (It’d have to be accepted as a viable research resource for that really to happen, right?)
I don’t know. But I do know that people need something on the line in order to be the most effective at anything they do.
Read Seth’s blog post and let me know what you think.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thought you might find this interesting in regards to higher education. The entire MIT courseload is online now. http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north748.html
Yeah MIT does it. Stanford has something similar. Several schools offer opencourseware that’s free. The difference is even if you go through every course on there, they won’t award you a degree for your efforts.
Perhaps the discussion should really be about redefining what are academic requirements for the various industries. Because that may be the only way that the opencourseware model would truly work beyond “extraneous” professional development IMHO.
As long as employees use education level as a means to disqualify job candidates, the degree-granting system is still needed. So do we start the–for lack of a better word–”re-education” with the academic institutions or with the employers themselves?