Digital Collaboration and the 21st C.

"The fight over MOOCs isn’t about the value of college; a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education."

 

Comments: longish piece but a very good read. Bottom line: make sure universities and colleges don't go the way the music industry went when they saw mp3 coming and yet choose to ignore it. MOOCs are a serious threat (and opportunity).

 

Clay Shirky starts with the mp3 story and Napster, then introduces MOOCs as a similar phenomenon. They are similar in that they also beat the 'cost disease': education doesn't scale well, thus becoming ever more expensive relative to products and services that do scale (anything that can be mass produced, cars, computers, but not musical performances). He then goes on to point out that the Harvards of this world have deep enough pockets to be safe. Indeed, for them MOOCs are a marketing instrument. The institutions that should be worried are the non-ivy-league universities, some of which apparantly are better at producing loan defaults than graduates. Even qualitywise, not just in terms of price, MOOCs might offer a beter educational experience than these instutions. And he concludes by saying that "In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true." (peter sloep, @pbsloep; thanks Seb Schmoller for alerting me to this)

Via Peter B. Sloep

"EPIC 2020, stands for the proposition that the education of the world will change dramatically for the better during this decade. The two movies that follow and this site hope to provide tools that shatter the paradigm that the future will be anything like the past as well as facilitate discussion and accelerate actions to bring about the transformation of the education of the world."

 

Comment: published in May this year but missed by me then, the 10 minute video narrative starts by saying that the in the year 2020 most colleges and universities no longer exist. A story unfolds that begins with the success of the Khan Academy and Udacity, that predicts a merger between Apple buyes Amazon ('AppleZone') to boost the iTunesU, to which Google reacts with providing access to services that 'know what you know' and on the basis thereof 'predict what you need to know". In 2020 this revolution - the domination of global education by Apple and Google is complete, all universities and colleges have gone, except for those who cater for the rich and compete on the quality of food and leisure they provide. Watch it, your 10 minutes are well spent! (peter sloep, @pbsloep)

Via Peter B. Sloep