Re: The Cost of Learning

Tony Hirst continues the discussion of the business of education by asking the question: “If we saw ourselves [the Open University] as web publishers, and we made money from page views/click thrus, what levels of traffic do we need to generate to make the same revenue from ‘learning content’ pages as we do currently?”

I left the following comment on Tony’s post:

Sometimes it’s helpful to temporarily lose the institutional constraints. Have you tried doing something like this to create a tabula rasa? “OU incorporates a new affiliated entity organized as a CIC. Its mission is to provide free learning.” Then start filling in the blanks that describe how that mission might be accomplished.

That’s meant just for illustration. Start with whatever story makes sense. The point is to chew on how you would achieve the mission given no preconceptions. Even if the exercise doesn’t go very far, you may see things in a slightly different way afterwards.

It strikes me that the world could really use some great social innovations. It’s not the technology that’s a limiting condition now. It’s how that technology gets put together. In the Industrial Revolution, the factory was the big social innovation that unleashed the power of the technology. Later, with railroads, the social innovation was the capital markets needed to finance rail development and expansion.

Maybe it’s just a matter of rearranging the existing. Or maybe we need some new organizational forms; or new laws and regulations; or new incentive structures; or all of these and something else as well. I don’t know. But surely it will involve social innovations where the central tenet is the broad public good.

I really hope that advertising is not the social innovation for the web. As a world, surely we can do better than this.