With more and more courses, video lectures and textbooks becoming open every day, how will online education make the world smarter? How does all this affect education? Industry? Commerce? Let’s take a look.
Good Will Hunting 2.0
One of my favorite movies of all time is “Good Will Hunting” starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. It’s a brilliantly written, anti-establishmentarian, indie gem. Matt Damon plays the main character, Will Hunting, who is a genius with a photographic memory and whose friends describe as “wicked smart”. The beautiful part is that Will taught himself everything that he knows.
A famous scene from the movie shows the main characters in a Harvard Bar trying to get girls. While Ben is desperately trying to present himself as a Harvard student, a long-haired trust-fund baby begins to question him about 18th century agrarian economics. Will, played by Damon, steps up to rescue his friend from embarrassing himself. Will puts the grad student in his place, ending with the quip “You spent $150,000 on an education that you could’ve got for a dollar fifty in late fees at your local library.”
Fiction becomes reality
In 2002, a school less than four miles from Harvard began a program that would’ve drastically helped Will Hunting save even the $1.50. Open Course Ware, a project founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an approach to make higher education available to everybody who can connect, and almost ten thousand courses are available online. Schools like Harvard, Norte Dame, MIT, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley now post entire courses online, and even stream video recordings of lectures online.
But what is the application of all this technology? Here are some things that have been learned in recent experiements with OCW and other free online classes.
Ivy League Everybody
MIT was the first school to launch OpenCourseWare, and since then, many schools have also joined. Some schools, like UC Berkeley and Standford have started providing video podcasts of all of their lectures on iTunes U for free.
Richard Muller, Ph. D, teaches physics at UC Berkeley, and more specifically teaches a class aptly named “Physics for Future Presidents” intended for the general studies audience. The class is entertaining and helps the average student understand complicated physics. But the class isn’t limited specifically to Berkeley— the entire lecture series is available from iTunes and the lecture notes, syllabus and excerpts from the textbook are available on the course website.
This isn’t an isolated case. Stanford offers lectures online via iTunes U and even includes their slides. Schools across the nation, Ivy League or otherwise, are following suit. Thousands of courses are appearing on the OpenCourseWare Consortium, iTunes U or are becoming available on school websites.
However, many schools are facing budget cuts and dwindling enrollment across the country. Many school hesitate putting access to their courses online because they fear losing potential students to free courses. However, one school is showing that the opposite may be true.
Free courses may not hurt enrollment
Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah decided to try something completely different with their distance learning program. In 2009, they offered six classes for free under the umbrella of open course ware, and actually increased the total amount of enrollments in their school’s distance learning program. In just four months, the six courses brought in 445 paid enrolments and almost 14,000 visitors.
This is “the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance-learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing open courseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it,”
—BYU associate professor David Wiley, Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dr. Wiley is a major proponent of the Open Course movement, providing links to studies, articles and courses on his personal site.
What does the future hold?
With more and more courses, video lectures and textbooks becoming open every day, the fact is that we have greater access than ever before. More and more people are given the chance to educate themselves beyond the scope of what was available before.