Can Higher Ed go Open Source?

[Pat Coyle]

Following is an excerpt from a Fast Company article about the coming wave of Open Source education. We recommend reading the entire article...and invite your comments here.

Fast Company - Today, "open content" is the biggest front of innovation in higher education. The movement that started at MIT has spread to more than 200 institutions in 32 countries that have posted courses online at the OpenCourseWare Consortium. But, as Wiley points out, there's still a big gap between viewing such resources as a homework aid and building a recognized, accredited degree out of a bunch of podcasts and YouTube videos. "Why is it that my kid can't take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can't we put 130 of those together and make it a degree?" Wiley asks. "There are all these kinds of innovations waiting to happen. A sufficient infrastructure of freely available content is step one in a much longer endgame that transforms everything we know about higher education."

The transformation of education may happen faster than we realize. However futuristic it may seem, what we're living through is an echo of the university's earliest history. Universitas doesn't mean campus, or class, or a particular body of knowledge; it means the guild, the group of people united in scholarship. The university as we know it was born around AD 1100, when communities formed in Bologna, Italy; Oxford, England; and Paris around a scarce, precious information technology: the handwritten book. Illuminated manuscripts of the period show a professor at a podium lecturing from a revered volume while rows of students sit with paper and quill -- the same basic format that most classes take 1,000 years later.

Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions. The string-quartet model of education is no longer sustainable. The university of the future can't be far away.More

What will it take to open up the education business? Share your thoughts here

[Kathy Gehlhausen Slaughter]

I like Rollie's 4 part breakdown, and I also noticed someone's comment about how open-source is better used for continuing education and professional development. However, there is a missing element to the discussion so far: intensity.

When we enter into an official, in-person education program, we are in for an intense ride, whether we're taking one class or a full-time schedule, we agree to dedicate at least three hours a week to classroom time and then additional time for exams, labs, papers, etc. I think this intensity of time-compressed study contributed to how well I absorbed the material, especially liberal arts/humanities material, because it occupied such a huge part of my time. Also, in the classrooms I experienced as a philosophy/poli sci undergrad and masters in social work, students informally assisted the instructor by helping each other understand the concepts or just discussing them. From the online cont ed experiences I've had, I can tell I absorb information much more thoroughly if I discuss it.

Open-source might come to replace an initial starting point of information, but I think a structured program in a learning community of some kind, even via instant messaging, would be needed to round it out.