I think I’ve mentioned it before here, but I’ve been thinking for a long time of doing some further studies. The two things that have been holding me back, to varying degrees, are time and money. To some extent I’ve managed to solve the time issues, but because I’m outside of my own country the money issue is still complicated.
There was a NYT article in our newspaper on Saturday, Digital Text Clicks With US Students, that had some interesting things to say about the future of education. Teachers in the US are being encouraged to upload lessons in the form of PowerPoint presentations, videos and research materials. There’s also a move away from textbooks toward free course-ware, educational games, videos and projects on the web.
I especially liked the comment of Ms Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology at one of the schools who said:
“Kids are wired differently these days. They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote. Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”
It added to my thoughts a little about the backlash I was writing about a while ago from educators who feel that the internet is promoting poor critical thinking. Could part of the problem be a mismatch between the way they are teaching and the way their students want to learn?
The NYT article goes on to say that it’s inevitable that education will move more and more online and hopes that (online) textbooks may become free. It stops short of suggesting that it could go further than that though.
Is there any reason that it couldn’t be that in the future education couldn’t become (almost) free?
A recent article at Mashable, In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero thinks it’s possible and has some great examples of universities, like the UN’s University of the People and MITOpenCourseWare, that are already using social media technologies and ideas to get their courses online, as close to free as possible.
As venture capitalist Brad Burnham says in the Mashable article:
“Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple: but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news.”
I think people who educate are very valuable, and of course have to be paid, and when I study I can imagine the kind of academic staff I want to work with. So, I’m not hoping to get a free ride. I’m absolutely willing to pay something.
But the bloat of the current situation… the campuses, the administrators and the profiteering, makes education unaffordable for so many people. There will be a lot of people with vested interests who want to keep all that in place, but personally I’m hoping that education follows print media to be the next big “digital crisis” for businesses.
pic by creativespark
2 Comments
August 11, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Lots of valuable information is now free and readily available on the Internet for self-learning. Let’s not forget our libraries either.
But as you said, an education is a different story altogether. You would need accreditation, instructors, physical campuses, and all these cost money.
The high demand is driving up the school fees, and unfortunately, I don’t see any end to this trend.
August 12, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Ah… that’s what they said about newspapers.