Why The World Needs Open Education
We know that education makes people more productive but that obtaining education (particularly advanced education) can be quite costly, if not prohibitive. But what if that education were free? What if, as a society, we adopted a distance education format that was open and free to everyone with access to the Web? For instance, the Krebs Cycle is the same whether we learn about it in Bergen, Santiago, Vancouver, or Adelaide. Similarly, we can learn calculus, economics, and many other subjects in one part of the world and be fairly confident that people in other parts of the world will be able to understand us.
When you look at different subjects, you can see that in essence, the basic concepts of any discipline are universal and don’t change that quickly, 1 and those concepts are in the public domain. While there’s bound to be some cultural differences in how the material is presented (e.g., using local examples to make the concepts more relevant), the principles are the same.
And if we look at how these concepts are currently transmitted, we see that there’s a lot of duplication and inefficiency. Professors (at various universities) and textbooks explain the concepts in slightly different ways, and students begin to incorporate and apply these concepts. But if the basic concepts remain the same, do we really need all of this duplication of effort? Wouldn’t society be better off if, rather than using resources to recreate and recycle information that changes very little, we put more effort into putting the information into a consistent form and making that information widely available? 2 By doing this, society could spend more time working on discovering new knowledge, and if Hockbein’s assertion that increasing the store of information/knowledge creates wealth, then we could make all of humanity better off.
If we look at the Web as a means of storing and transmitting [a portion of] human knowledge, then we see that anyone who has access to the Web is able to (in principal at least) access all of human knowledge and to build upon that knowledge. And because it allows us to distribute information to anyone else able to connect to it, the Web has tremendous potential to transform the way that people learn and can provide a low-cost means of educating the masses. 3
Now while I think the case for free advanced education (i.e., open education) is sound—it raises labour productivity at a low marginal cost—the real problem is implementation and addressing all of the questions it raises. For example, how do we encourage people to create quality educational content? How do we accredit students (i.e., ensure they have the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities)? How do we settle on what content should be in course? Your thoughts? Questions (and possible answers) I haven’t thought of?
- While one can certainly argue that the basics of a field can change quickly, I’d suggest that these “basics” actually cover a very specific knowledge domain that is a subset of a larger body of knowledge. For example, while new engineering processes may be discovered that make producing a material less costly, those specific details would probably not be critical for success in the larger engineering field. Regardless of the pace of change in a field, by narrowing the number of courses and making them freely available, the new knowledge can be communicated more quickly to those people who are specializing in that field and ensuring that they have the most current body of knowledge available. ↩
- According to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network is n2. While this does over-simplify matters, in general, the more that people share the same ideas, the greater the value those ideas have (e.g., reduced communication costs since everyone understands each other) and the greater the chances of some new discovery as the ideas are exposed to a larger portion of the environment. ↩
- In economic terms, by freeing access to education we can significantly reduce the costs of making labour inputs more productive which can ultimately result in greater output and benefits for humanity. ↩
