The Unbearable Irrelevance of University

Last fall, David Wiley stood in front of a room full of professors and university administrators and delivered a prediction that made them squirm: "Your institutions will be irrelevant by 2020." DN

Universities cannot help themselves. They grow more irrelevant with each passing day, and soon everyone will understand the pointlessness of attending university for any reason except for professional (medical, dental etc), engineering, or scientific training.

Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living, he says. In that life, information is available on demand, files are shared, and the world is mobile and connected. Today's colleges, on the other hand, are typically "tethered, isolated, generic, and closed," he says....

....Wiley is an amiable firebrand who helped launch the nation's "open content" movement a decade ago while he was getting his Ph.D. at BYU. Like the "open source" software movement that preceded it, open content makes it easy for authors, teachers and others to sign licensing agreements to freely share their copyrighted materials.

At its core, the open education movement and the larger open content, copyleft movement has "a fundamental belief that knowledge is a public good and should be fully shared," explains Catherine Casserly, senior partner with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Wiley, she says, is viewed in the open education realm as an imaginative innovator who is always thinking of new applications for disseminating knowledge to the many instead of keeping it "locked up" for the benefit of the few......

......Wiley sees a future where textbooks could always be downloaded for free, easily edited to meet the needs of the teacher and students. The average college textbook today costs between $100 and $150, he notes, so there's a kind of "arms race" constantly going on in which students figure out how to share textbooks or buy used ones, and publishers try to make the books obsolete every 18 months.

Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30. He also is the founder of the Utah Open High School, which debuts next fall. It, too, will use open content materials, and will provide an online education for 125 students. _DN_via_Technovelgy

So far, Flat World Knowledge has a small selection of textbooks. Textbook Revolution has a wider selection of categories and particulars. But give them time.

Free online lectures are proliferating on YouTube, Google Video, and several other online venues. See Lecture Fox, or this list for more. But these open courseware resources are just the beginning. Free textbooks and lectures can only get you so far. You also need some form of certification of knowledge or proficiency.

In addition, certain university courses require intensive laboratory training, often with supervision. Many of the sciences, professions, and engineering / technology disciplines cannot be mastered without well-supervised hands-on training. For that type of learning to go "open source", a way of simulating expensive lab experiential training online -- or via sophisticated interactive software -- will be needed.

Open source universities may need to borrow a trick from homeschooling, and create an "open source cooperative" that provides sophisticated simulation equipment too expensive for individual students to afford. In fact, combining "de-centralised simulation" facilities with independent testing and certification facilities makes a great deal of sense, in terms of allowing small communities to provide wide-spectrum highly sophisticated educational experiences to their citizens.

Realistically, a sophisticated system of education capable of training competent lifelong learners for the future, will not be free. But it's clear that modern universities have priced themselves out of the future for most of tomorrow's learners. And too, becoming fascist indoctrination centers for zomboid political correctness hasn't helped the case of universities.

Once people really start catching on, the collapse of the university system should happen quickly. When that happens, more useful alternatives will need to be in place. Who will be the Bill Gates of the next phase of education?