Education at the Crossroads
By Seth Godin
Actually, there isn't one, there are three choices that anyone offering higher education
is going to have to make.
Should this be scarce or abundant?
MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes available for free online. The marginal
cost of this is pretty close to zero, so it's easy for them to share. Abundant education is
easy to access and offers motivated individuals a chance to learn.
Scarcity comes from things like accreditation, admissions policies or small classrooms.
Should this be free or expensive?
Wikipedia offers the world's fact base to everyone, for free. So it spreads.
On the other hand, some bar review courses are so expensive the websites don't
even have the guts to list the price.
The newly easy access to the education marketplace (you used to need a big campus
and a spot in the guidance office) means that both the free and expensive options are
going to be experimented with, because the number of people in the education
business is going to explode (then implode).
If you think the fallout in the newspaper business was dramatic, wait until you see what happens to education.
Should this be about school or about learning?
School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking
and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is 'getting it'. It's the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn't care about workbooks or long checklists.
For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning.
For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally
different activities.
The combinations...
Imagine a school that's built around free, abundant learning. And compare it to
one that's focused on scarce, expensive schooling. Or dream up your own
combination. My recent MBA program, for example, was scarce (only 9 people
got to do it) and it was free and focused on learning.
Just because something is free doesn't meant there isn't money to be made.
Someone could charge, for example, for custom curricula, or focused tutoring,
or for a certified (scarce) degree. When a million people are taking your course,
you only need 1% to pay you to be happy indeed.
Eight combinations of the three choices are available and my guess is that all
eight will be tried. If I were going to wager, I'd say that the free, abundant learning
combination is the one that's going to change the world.
http://www.sethgodin.com (click on my head!)
my lens: http://www.squidoo.com/seth and my books: http://www.amazon.com/Seth-Godin/e/B000AP9EH0
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