Smarts Factory
It’s here! The Utopian ideal of free education for all is closer than ever thanks to the Interweb. While the ‘open classroom’ concept has been evolving for several years, many prestigious universities and colleges are now offering high quality audio and even video recordings online of their classes. I’ve been taking an online physics course (I know, N-E-R-D…) from MIT for the past several weeks and the quality is exceptional. Some great places examples include;
- MIT Opencourseware
- UC Berkley Online
- iTunesU (Includes courses from Stanford, Oxford, and many more. To access open iTunes, goto the iTunes Store, and then select iTunesU)
We could use more of these right now...
This is a spectacular idea. Education is a powerful tool and I cannot applaud the participating institutions enough for providing this content. I highly doubt that by posting topical and freshmen courses online they will lower their enrollments, while providing information and content that other schools and students from around the world can use to enrich the quality of their courses and educations. What’s interesting is no Canadian post-secondary institutions currently offer this service (at least not that I could find), and only two of them - Athabasca and Capilano College - are part of the OpenCourseware Consortium. Since most schools in Canada are largely funded with public dollars, there is a strong case to be made that schools should provide these courses online for public consumption. This would allow Canadians to appreciate the high quality of our post-secondary system and perhaps help to increase our willingness to fund our universities and colleges so that we may continue to compete globally in the ‘knowledge economy’. Or, if our schools stink, maybe forcing them to post some of their classes online will light the fire they need to increase the quality of their education. In any case seems like a low cost/high return program. Let’s get on it…
I may get rocks thrown at me for this comment but I still think it needs to be said.
Give the context of our current system, our social contract as it were, I would have to disagree with some of the assumptions in this article. Most notably is the notion that since our universities are publicly funded, they should provide online education for free like MIT.
Unfortunately, the average government funding for most large universities in Canada is 25%. The rest of the operating budget for a university come from endowments, foundations and private funding. Universities can not afford to add to their responsibilities providing video, lecture notes and other resources online unless they get additional funding. And even though the courses online have a reduced cost in terms of infrastructure, the other costs of this project are large. The technology costs of servers, video cameras, and the labour-hours associated with file conversion, server maintenance, and tech support are more than we often assume. It would be grievous to embark on this project without having additional funding because the students who paid for their education would ultimately suffer.
I’m not suggesting that education shouldn’t be offered in this format nor do I think it is an unrealistic utopic ideal to strive for education for all. Unfortunately, the degradation of education continues and there a many who suggest amazing alternatives without assessing the impacts on the university, the students, and then eventual education outputs that result.
Great comment - the underlying technology can be fairly expensive and the model used in the US is to partner with technolgy firms such as YouTube or iTunes who donate the server space and bandwidth. A similar model would probably need to be found in Canada due to the woefully low levels of funding post-secondary institutions now recieve in most provinces, however it’s also not a coincidence that many of the schools pursuing this idea have large, large endowments. Alternatively the federal government could setup a central service for hosting and distribution to reduce the burden on universities, or alternatively for the more right of center voters, the government could set some parameters and offer an open bid to the private sector to offer these services while being funded by the feds. This would be one way for the federal government to more directly support education along with the more generic provincial transfer payments or student loan system. No rocks thrown here!