If Udacity is Napster, Who Will Be iTunes?
My Who Decides? post has produced some rather heated email. In answer, no, I am not defending the existing university system: I quit my faculty position at the University of Toronto in part because it doesn’t serve students well, and doesn’t have a future beyond elite networking-building [1]. But the fact that educational reactionaries are wrong doesn’t mean that all educational revolutionaries are right; it particularly doesn’t mean that the centralizing pseudo-progressives are on the side of the angels.
For example, quite a few people have pointed me at Clay Shirky’s recent post comparing Udacity with Napster. In it, Shirky says:
The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
OK, I buy that. But in talking about some feedback Udacity got on the awful quality of its statistics course, he says:
Conceding that Delta “points out a number of shortcomings that warrant improvements”, Thrun detailed how they were going to update the class. [emphasis added]
Aye, there’s the rub. In the Udacity/Coursera/Khan model, “they” are the only ones who can update the learning material, and thereby decide what’s to be learned. Where’s the hackability? When, where, and how can I fork their course, make changes, and send a merge request? Sure, I can set up my own, but if I have to compete with Harvard’s prestige (read: its old boys’ network), that’s like saying that anyone could set up their own TV network—in practice, only those with bankrolls like Turner’s and Murdoch’s can pull it off. (I used to write for The Independent in London, and felt very sad when it stopped deserving that name.)
As far as I can see, the pseudo-MOOC model that the New York Times and others are gushing about effectively concentrates power in ever-fewer hands. Some of it is indirect—if 90% of learners get their lessons from six “prestige” schools, a lot of voices will effectively be silenced—and some of it is pretty explicit:
You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera, or use any Letter of Completion as part of any tuition-based or for-credit certification or program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera.
Got that? You can watch their videos, and do their exercises, but you can’t even take the badge they give you somewhere else unless they say you can. That’s a hell of a lot more restrictive than any policy any old-style university I know of could get away with: there, the receiving institution decides whether or not to accept prior work, and the granting institution has no say in the matter.
A while back (January? February?) somebody in Mozilla’s learning team asked whether we should be teaching kids how to re-mix their Facebook pages. I think we should instead teach them how to re-mix the walled-garden LMSes that everyone seems to want to hand their future to.
[1] I predict that within five years, we will see companies offering residential campus life to 18-25′s who are getting their education online. They’ll provide exam invigilation (so that those digital badges the kids are earning actually mean something), a gym, lab and studio space for sciences and the arts, and most importantly, a chance to socialize. I do not think this is a good future—in practice, it will set the clock back to 1950, when higher education was the preserve of a privileged few.
“You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera, or use any Letter of Completion as part of any tuition-based or for-credit certification or program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera.”
I have no idea how that could be enforceable.
I’ll defend the university system. Saying that it does not serve students well is an insult to the many many people at the university whose passion and dedication to teaching and learning is focussed on serving students.
Whether or not universities serve students well is not the focus of your post, and you certainly argue that concentrating educational certification in the hands of a few corporations is worse than the current system. However, the blanket criticism of the university and the people within it who work really hard to educate will only perpetuate myths about what universities provide students.
The focus in the media on the big traditional lectures misses the many different kinds of learning opportunities students have at the university including but certainly not limited to small first year seminars, community-based service learning, entrepreneurship activities, mentorship programs, study abroad programs, participation in open source projects, participation in leading edge research projects, writing support, and language support. It ignores the very real efforts made by individual instructors, staff, student life services to reach out to students as individuals. It especially misses the real and valuable support provided to students with additional needs such as learning disabilities, mental health, and crisis counselling.
I am not so idealistic to fail to see problems and limitations of the current system. There are poor teachers, and there are students who have a poor learning experience. There are valid concerns about student debt load and the value of a university education. There are tensions between the value of research and teaching at the faculty level. Like any large institution there are problems that are handled well and problems that are handled poorly. As a publicly funded institution in a depressed economy, there are always budget concerns and questions about whether we are spending the limited resources well.
On the other hand, we watch students grow, learn, and thrive at the university. We see increasing enrolments, and increased alumni engagement and support (and would welcome even more). The support and incentives for improving the quality of teaching at an institutional level are only increasing.
Yes, the nature of higher education is changing. Universities move slowly, but they are also home to great innovation. Much of the research and innovation in the online education space is being carried out by university researchers and teachers. At the U of T and at many other universities, we will get things wrong and we will get things right, but we will continue to be focussed on serving students.