The September 1 issue of Fast Company has a great article on How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education.
Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can’t easily improve efficiency.
Oh, yeah. I remember. I was at Princeton in 1966. Bowen was my professor for Economics 101. I thought economics was such a crock that I never took another course in the subject.
If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
Indeed, why should students go to mediocre face-to-face lectures when they can watch presentations from MIT, Stanford, and so on on the internet?
Free, open content provides an irresistible value proposition. I predict we’re going to see more and more shared corporate content. The step after that could well be shared social learning, along the lines of what David Wiley is doing in Utah:
Wiley’s most recent open course was formatted as an online role-playing game, with students divided into “guilds” completing “quests” — a learning community inspired by the world of online gamers. “If you didn’t need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university,” Wiley says. “We all realize that content is just the first step.”
Since its faculty are no longer lecturers, Western Governors University has redefined their roles:
For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor. “Our faculty are there to guide, direct, counsel, coach, encourage, motivate, keep on track, and that’s their whole job,” Mendenhall says. Multiple-choice tests are scored by computer, while essays and in-person evaluations are judged by a separate cadre of graders. What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the “sage on the stage” conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator. WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.
Colleges are ahead of corporations when it comes to using free online content but I sense this is a temporary situation.
togetherLearn and CLO magazine recently conducted a survey on meta-learning.
Less than one third of the Chief Learning Officers who took part in the survey are involved in making decisions about employee access to the internet and YouTube!
Organizations give many reasons for blocking access to the net and YouTube, among them:
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- It is a drain on productivity
- It is a security issue within the company computer systems
- People may harm the company brand should employees reveal too much information
- It is a bandwidth issue
I suspect the real issue is lack of trust. If you have low expectations of your workers, they will live down to them. That aside, companies need to balance the benefits of access to the dangers.
This morning Amber Johnson sent me this nifty list of Fifty Must-Listen-to Lectures for Tech Lovers. Perhaps some of them can help you make the case for access to open content in your organization.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I still feel uncomfortable with the reliance on multiple choice questions, especially when linked with grades. Multiple choice can actually be good for exploring multiple directions (and everything has multiple directions) but the whole system of judging how good people are at recognizing the unique officially “right” answer seems to me a clear regression that reinforces the notions of both “infallible educational authority” and canned knowledge divorced from both context and complexity.
Where the corporate world is in advance in its apparent concern to assess the benefits of learning in terms of increased performance rather than grades. But of course I have to use the qualifier “apparent” because I don’t see a lot of effort put into establishing and appreciating the link between the two.
Also I believe we need to think about the significance of transforming the sage on the stage to the sage behind the stage, Wizard of Oz style.
Forget the string quartet: the model should be the jam session, where talent is developed through interplay and motivated interaction and where the less proficient learn from their more proficient peers, developing their own style and voice from the different ones they listen to and interact with.
I had difficulty locating the article cited. It might have been moved. I believe the current URL is:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html?page=0%2C3
Certainly an interesting read.
Interesting to read about IT departments limiting access to youtube. Having worked in IT for very large corporations there are a number of reasons with one of them being bandwidth and the costs associated with it.
I recall when google earth came out it coincided with the company network becoming incredibly slow…a huge number of employees had downloaded the app and were using it on a daily basis! Even if the company had wanted to let the staff have full access it was tricky as the network would struggle.