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 be open to the world, much remains to be achieved if all the implications of that promise are to be realized.  According to Steven Lerman, director of OCW, the first big 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 this 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 and then heap upon their berg of expertise.  The faculty’s value to their graduate students lies in remaining the guide and they have strong incentives to keep the clearest views from the eyes of potential competitors.
   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 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 compensation to the success of a course.  That could be 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.
   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 prevents the fruition of the Internet as what we will come to think of as the "global mind".
   Concomitant with the need for software that automatically keeps track of the intellectual horse races is the need to preserve motivation for running in a race.  While this might be solved for people already attached to institutions, such tying of advancement to performance does 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 in the current context.
   Much as it is contrary to the politically correct emphasis on making content free to be modified, there are no good ways to separate this crucial freedom the meaning of free as in free beer.  This problem suggests that the pendulum of PC thought will swing back towards giving content creators greater degree of 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 this upon the free and 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 (think winner-take-all) the emergence of consistent views.  These dominant views will be overturned when an alternative coherent view gains the preponderance of evidence attached by the efforts of individuals to both views, dragging down the one and raising up the other.
   The environment in which all this takes place might be thought of as a market in ideas.  An author would start out by owning all of her creation but as others vie to contribute to her framework, she may choose to integrate their works and give up some equity in exchange.  Accounting for the credits due to owners and preserving their rights would become very intricate but requires only simple arithmetic and mechanics readily embodied in software.
   Thus access to the developing parts of the global mind will become costly as in beer.  One way to think of it would be "pay to play" as if placing a bet.  Once admitted to a view, one could reverse the wager if inspection shows the berg ready to crumble or to be inferior to a competitor.  Since ownership leads to expectations of future revenues, it will 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.
   There would necessarily be people who knowingly spread falsehoods in order to manipulate the value of their properties.  However, these will be highly vulnerable to exposure.  The system can only succeed by rewarding capable actors, such as professors who really are at the top of their field.   The developers who build it will advance the consciousness of the planet.
   This does not answer the two questions which started out at the top of this page.  The business plan and the legal charter are important accoutrements but peripheral to the process and the software that implements it.