A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Roy Philips at BC Tel Advanced Communications. At the time, BC Tel was heavily investing in fiber optic installations, and the Advanced Communications arm was pushing hard to sell “Ubiquity” – a high-end videoconferencing service – to leverage the fiber investment. At $15K a month, plus installation costs, Ubiquity was a hard sell in 1994. Roy, however, saw an interesting future for the technology, one which sadly has yet to come to fruition.
On numerous occasions, Roy and I discussed the process of university education. I was, as usual, quite disappointed with the methods used by professors to communicate with students. In many cases, university professors just weren’t very good teachers – nor, to be fair, was that their purpose. They were there to do research. Every so often, you’d have a brilliant professor, someone who not only really knew their stuff, but also knew how to make it stick to the inside of the skull of an undergraduate at 8:30 in the morning, despite the student’s half-inebriated state. Those star professors were few and far between – I often wish we could capture those professors, and make them available to everyone.
One-to-many broadcasting was a perfect solution. As Roy saw it, universities should collaborate to find the best professor for a subject, capture his lecture series on video, and make it generally available. Instead of attending lectures, students would watch the video and then attend a videoconference tutorial session with that professor. Thus, the “best” teacher could be made available to the masses, improving the overall quality of education.
Unfortunately, the form of education has changed very little, despite the widespread availability of high-bandwidth networks. In one shining example of thought leadership, MIT’s OpenCourseWare has made the notes from its courses available. In other areas, two MIT professors have released their thermal physics textbook online, completely free. These efforts, though worthy of praise, signal only the beginning of a movement to make education freely and easily available.
To be truly successful, such a movement requires educational content that is both freely available and freely subject to revision to encourage constant and rapid improvement (perhaps the lessons learned by the Wikipedia). It seems that it would in the best interest of everyone to produce and maintain such a repository to not only improve education, but reduce the cost of education as well. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t exactly think it appropriate for publishers to charge me over $100 for the new edition of a Calculus textbook, especially when the concepts hadn’t changed since their creation by Newton. Were these publishers really adding any value?
If free education content were created and unleashed, it could even provide some interesting opportunities for education tailored to the student. In an ideal world, content would consist of not only static text, but also interactive questions to test the student’s comprehension. How the student fared on the informal quizzing could be used to fine tune how information is presented to the student, adapting to the particular learning styles of the individual. As I’ve lamented before, there has got to be a better way to approach education than the rote learning we currently use.
All of these ideas are far in the future – for now, why don’t we try to eliminate the empires being built on public domain knowledge? Seriously, how much has first-year physics changed in the past hundred years? Very little – so why should a student pay $100 for that knowledge? It will be interesting to see MIT lead the way by demonstrating that we can be more productive as a society by doing things once by doing them right the first time.