Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web (Part 1)

Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web (Part 1)
by Harold Jarche | Wed, 10/15/2008 - 08:12

Is the Web becoming the medium of choice for learners, and will teachers and finally administrators ever follow suit? George Siemens has discussed the idea of a world without traditional courses and he articulates three main components or requirements for online education:

1. Content;
2. Conversations & Connections; and
3. Reputation & Accreditation.

Content: There is an ever-expanding amount of free content online, from MIT's open courseware initiative to explanatory videos on YouTube. Most recently, the State of California has established a pilot project for community colleges to exchange methods and resources via an open educational resource (OER) system. This will definitely challenge traditional text book sales. Today there is no shortage of good educational content online, the difficulty is in finding it. Enter the second component - connections.

Connections: It is also getting easier to connect and have conversations from micro-blogging to collaborative web spaces. No longer are learners confined within their LMS. Social networks like Facebook and Linked-In are being used by people to connect and learn, and user-defined spaces on Ning or Grou.ps allow anyone to start a community space for free. For instance, there is currently an extremely large online course on Connectivism and Connected Knowledge being run by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, with over 2,000 registered participants. Another example is the Work Literacy "course" with over 500 members. It is being conducted in preparation for the eLearning Guild's DevLearn2008. I'm one of the facilitators and I'm doing this for free to support the wider community and to extend my own network. These courses are free, being freely taught and allow people to drop in and out as they see fit. So if the content is free and available, and the conversations and connections are enabled by social media then we are only missing an open or negotiated certification process.

Accreditation: The final component, accreditation, is the part that has yet to be democratized or crowd-sourced. The real money in higher education has always been around certification. That's why Harvard or Princeton can charge more. Their certification is worth more on the market. At this time, universities can charge more than community colleges because they provide a higher perceived value to the market. For the time being, online degrees aren't valued as much as in-place ones. For now, institutions control the accreditation of most fomal and recognized education. Certification, or how many degrees are granted, drives the funding model for many state-subsidized institutions. If you control the certification, you control the money flow. This will continue for as long as the state and the marketplace value the product and services provided by the institutions.
The dam for open learning will break as soon as the accreditation monopoly is breached. This could happen if a "good enough" way of determining competence was available and trusted by the marketplace in general. It could be something very formal like a respected third-party testing service or it could be informal and based on peer review. At this time, many employers ask for university graduates because it reduces the number of applicants, ensures that they are a bit older than recent public school graduates and gives some guarantee of a certain cognitive ability. In most cases it does not mean that the applicant is job-ready. Now what would happen if an applicant arrived with a certification from the web showing specific skills such as an ability to get published on a respected online journal or a blog with a readership in the thousands? Will the market accept these as readily as a degree from a journalism school?

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