Notions of Tomorrow’s University

In What I Think I Know Now, I discussed some things I’ve learned in my first year of blogging. Perhaps it was the catchy title of the PDF (Annual Report), but for whatever reasons the post received a resounding thud for reception.

Here is one section from the report. It provides a glimpse of a possible future for university learning. It’s still very sketchy, but you can see where I’m headed. The fuller version is located in the PDF, including quotes and references that provide more illustration.

3.    In a networked economy, social innovations in several areas provide the potential for educational change. I am thinking here mostly of university education, but suspect that some of it applies to other educational levels as well.

a.    Price: As educational content becomes digital, the marginal cost of that content approaches zero. Giving learners free access to content becomes an option. This does not mean that education becomes free. It merely exerts downward pressure on the price.

b.    Value: If educational content is given away freely, then what gets packaged with the content is what creates value and can be priced. This might include such things as easily finding content and judging its appropriateness, or personalized assistance in the learning process.

c.    Price redux: Value ancillary to content invites individual pricing based on actual usage. Learners differ, the services they need differ, and a la carte prices reflect that.

d.    Who pays and how: In educational markets, we normally think of institutions and learners and their families being involved in the exchange, with subsidies from government and from businesses. In a networked economy, it is possible to substantially alter this composition (e.g., using advertising revenue). Social innovations in this area can have dramatic impact on education. We don’t have it right yet. A broader more diffuse ecology of revenue streams might work.

e.    Access: If learners and their families bear lower educational costs, then access opens up. Self-selection replaces admissions to an unknown extent.

f.    Community: Access to a community of scholars and other learners is a critical part of an educational experience. Content alone does not provide this experience, no matter how freely it is provided. Communities are now largely institution specific, with exceptions for study abroad, service learning, and other special programs. Networked learning provides much broader opportunity for participation in diverse communities of practice or some variation of these. I’ll simply call them communities of learning.

g.    Credentials: Certificates and degrees provide what Brown and Duguid call a “tradable token in the job market.” As such, they serve students, educational institutions, and employers well.  As Benkler mentions, a number of existing web sites (e.g., Amazon and Slashdot) incorporate peer-review and multiple levels of moderation to ensure what he calls the “relevance/accreditation” of content. Adaptation of these for communities of learning seems entirely possible. Credentials and degrees, or more likely their improved equivalents, seem plausible.

h.    Locus: Members of a community of learning need not be geographically local, yet the communities themselves can still emerge from local needs, cultural beliefs, languages or other considerations sufficiently important to supply cohesion. Scale, geography, and political boundaries partially diffuse.

i.    Pedagogy: The stereotype of teaching and learning as knowledge transmission was probably never entirely true. But networked communities of learning provide an alternative paradigm in which learners at all levels can develop or co-create knowledge. The distinctions between teaching and learning soften.

j.    Membership: Members self-select themselves into networked communities of learning. Our notions about expertise will blur and then modify. Underemployed but talented people (e.g., adjunct faculty) seem likely to find communities of learning attractive.

k.    Markets and firms: Many educational problems seem intractable given available resources and competing priorities. Current public, private, non-market, and market delivery options often seem simply overwhelmed and reform efforts provide only a patchwork of relief. Social entrepreneurs are active in education and their efforts may provide blended market models. New institutions like the Community Interest Companies in the UK also provide interesting options. Or it may be possible to tap into the apparently large reservoir of social production that Benkler describes. Or some combination, or something else entirely. The core feature is improving the global commonweal. There is huge potential here, but much creative experimentation remains.