The School of Athens by Raphael depicts the Academy founded by Plato in Athens in the 4th Century B.C.

 

While much has been said about the liberation of musical content as its free proliferation across the internet increases, attempting to locate this phenomenon in online learning—as some have—is fundamentally misguided. The experiment of the so-called “open” university is not a new one, and its failings have been well-documented: shoddy scholarship, inconsistent curricula, and ideological radicalism.

 

Before I launch into my argument, here’s an example of the commentary I refer to above (from elearnspace):

“I’ve been harping on this for a while - content is no longer a value point in itself. MITs OpenCourseWare and numerous other open educational projects reflect this reality in the education market. In music, news, and other media, a trend of content as a conduit to new value points is evident. Artists are giving away music and hoping to capitalize on live performance and merchandising.”

Content can only be created in the presence of incentives. While musicians do and will continue to produce tracks as they watch their revenue stream from recorded music sales dwindle, this only occurs because the success of recorded music is critical to touring success. In essence, the consumption of recorded music has become the locus through which consumers discover new artists—it has shifted from being a primary commodity to a secondary one.

 

Last.fm, Pandora, Limerwire, iLike, and Bittorrent are all vehicles for the free dissemination of music, but they are not the sole outlets for its consumption. Concerts and festivals continue to offer a unique environment for experiencing music, and fans are still willing to pay large sums of money to see their favorite acts on-stage. Moreover, music functions to increase the power of the artist as a brand and enable them to market a seemingly endless line of other consumer commodities like clothing lines, nightclubs, or electronics.

 

When looking for a similar phenomenon in online education, commentators have observed that numerous prestigious institutions like MIT and Berkeley have begun to offer most of their lectures online. While some may herald this trend as the democratization of learning, such a diagnosis represents fundamentally inaccurate wishful thinking. Here’s why:

 

I. Most of the economic value of educational content doesn’t actually lie in the content itself, but rather in the way the market perceives the value of that content. That is to say, if you listen to every single astrophysics lecture on the MIT server, you will probably have a pretty good understanding of astrophysics. But, the market-value of your knowledge is still roughly the same as the market-value of what you put into gaining it: nothing. On face it might seem absurd that the only thing separating two identically knowledgeable individuals is a piece of paper with a couple signatures on it—but once the function of the diploma as a sort of educational “seal of approval” is understood it begins to make sense. The explanation comes in the second point:

 

II. The market does value actual knowledge, but only after it has passed through the filter of standardization. In other words, interviewers will test job candidates for competence, but only after examining their resume to determine if they meet basic qualifications as assessed by others. The bulk of university expenditures go towards pedagogical standardization: salaries for professors who will teach well and teach well consistently, teaching assistants who can grade consistently, departmental budgets so that departments can collaborate on and standardize course materials, etc. When a pupil is granted a certificate upon graduation, that certificate represents hundreds of graded assessments that the student successfully passed.

 

The academic world treats research—intellectual property—in the same way: peers review submissions before they are considered worthy of publication. Professors who publish a lot of academic content are rewarded with increased salaries, increased research budgets, endowed positions, etc. The reason is because the content is valuable: it is either helpful to economic actors like corporations or governments, or insightful to individuals who place a monetary value on the analysis provided by the scholarship. In the academic world, professors’ worth is based primarily on their ability to generate quality content that has real economic value rather than their ability to perform in a lecture hall. Sure, there is some value-added for good lecturers, but any university student will tell you that many of the biggest names in academia are rather dry in person.

 

III. Why wikiversity will always lose to university. In documenting the way academic content is created and taught to students, it becomes abundantly clear that the Wiki model fails to create rigorous pedagogy. The user-generated, user-regulated model championed by supporters of the wikiversity doesn’t understand basic economic behavior. While people are willing to contribute to or edit Wikipedia, there are clear incentives for participation: anyone can become a high-ranking Wikipedia editor (even this is disputed), and all contributors are at least theoretically equal. In an educational scenario where there is a value asymmetry—the professor is transmitting knowledge to the students—there exists no incentive for an instructor whose knowledge and expertise is worth anything in the real world to give it away for free. Indeed, even if professors at Berkeley and MIT are more than happy to give away their lectures for free, asking them to donate time and energy to regulate the learning experiences of online students is simply not realistic. Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that this analysis doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the administrative requirements for maintaining a university that manages students’ learning effectively–further damning the wikiversity model.

Tags: Learning Technologies, Online Education