Open Learning

This session will be conducted as a workshop focused on developing a practical strategy for open online education. The goal is to create a model for an online teaching environment that enables a continuing feedback loop between one teacher and many students and classes of students and online curriculum sufficiently engaging to attract and sustain students’ interests in higher education. What type of business plan can sustain this model? How should an effective legal charter be designed?

REPLIES

Bruce McHenry

The experience with OpenCourseWare illustrates the promise and the pitfalls of open online education. Heralded as the site where all MIT courses would become available to the world, much remains to be achieved if that promise is to be fully realized. The first gotcha was the realization that professors routinely distribute proprietary materials that have to be scrubbed from the web version. This issue quickly came to dominate the implementation of OCW.

The copyrighted content problem is linked to the advancement and compensation of faculty based on publication in fee based journals with elitist and slow paced review processes. While changing all of that could result in reforms greatly benefiting challengers and the vigor of research, it would do so at the expense of those who have long labored to climb up and then heap upon their berg of expertise.

The success of a system depends on the degree to which it serves the needs of its users. OCW does little to serve the needs of professors or students enrolled at MIT. How could it do better? Advancement at all levels, including even of students towards graduation, needs to be linked to achievements in the OCW domain. For example, every student could be required to tutor a student not enrolled at MIT. This movement should be led by tying faculty promotion to the success of a course measured by the size of its following and its direct impact on the open reference works it uses and improves.

These changes could be mandated but they would not be sufficient. It is technology that defines the art of the possible and the software for collaborative work is still extraordinarily primitive. The wiki upon which this site and wikipedia are built is analogous to the Model T, in its first decade when it required hand cranking and frequent repair at the roadside. (OCW publishes to .PDF files. These inhibit modification and collaborative improvement, a grand but impractical step backwards like offering door-to-door service using rails and railroad cars.)

This wiki has no mechanism for laying out competing versions such that one comes to dominate through the force of evidence and argument. This inadequacy preserves the role of the faculty guide but holds back the development of a “global mind”.

Concomitant with the need for software that automatically keeps track of the intellectual horse races is the need to compensate the hard work that racing entails. Tying of advancement to performance may be sufficient for people already attached to institutions but it would not help unattached individuals to achieve a living wage. There is also the problem that greatly improving the quality of free education tends rather to undermine the business model of academe. So scratch my suggestions above. They are not going to be implemented by the establishment.

Despite the politically correct emphasis on making content free to be modified, there are no good ways to separate this critical freedom from the meaning of free as in free beer. The intractability of this problem suggests that the pendulum of politically correct thought will swing back. Content creators need ownership with attendant rights to control access and demand payment. Before you react with shock and horror, let me say that the pendulum will not swing until a system is deployed which layers the fee based content upon the costless content of wikipedia and the open source software.

Besides giving back ownership, such software would recognize even small contributions and place them in a competitive environment that strongly rewards the emergence of consistent views. These dominant views can be overturned if an alternative coherent view gains a preponderance of evidence which is included and weighed by the efforts of individuals who labor, speculate and sometimes change the dominant order of things. (The publishing framework ought to ensure that dissenters can leave discreet links which gain in prominence according to the accumulated weight of their evidence and argument. The author should not be able to remove these and will often negotiate to incorporate them.)

In this market in ideas, an author would start out by owning all of her creation. As others vie to contribute to her framework, she may choose to integrate their works and give up some equity in exchange. Or the owners of content embedded in the framework might buy her out and offer her seminal content for free as a way to draw users into their newer and more valuable offshoots. In this way, traffic may be drawn out to the budding branches where all of the growth and economic exchange occurs.

Thus access to the developing parts of the global mind will require some kind of fee. One might think of this gate as "pay to play" as if one was placing a bet. Once admitted to a view, one could cover the wager if it looks like the berg is ready to crumble or simply be surpassed by a competitor. Since ownership leads to expectations of future revenues, it would give rise to equity and options markets. These would have duration consistent with the length of time that it takes to create a winning alternative view. For the preponderance of contributions, this would be measured in minutes. Individuals make a lot of mistakes making corrections is much more fun if there is a score. That pay might only be measured in pennies but steady payoff for sustained effort and brilliant insight will make participation economically viable. A few contributions will withstand onslaughts from within and without to become reference works and portals leading to the frontiers of knowledge, the Everests of their domain.

There would necessarily be people who knowingly spread falsehoods in order to manipulate the value of their investments. However, liars will be highly vulnerable if others can bet on exposing them. The system can only succeed if capable actors, such as professors who really are leaders in their field, become economic winners. The developers who make this possible will raise the consciousness of the planet. It may be unappealing that those with greatest access will remain those with the greatest wealth but it has ever been thus. The man of economic needs cannot be divorced from man of intellectual aspirations. In all likelihood, the closer the marriage, the better it will be for both.

This does not answer the two questions which started out at the top of this page. Neither business plans nor legal charters are the sticking points. “The medium is the message” and the medium is far from done.