Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting bit on Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future Of A Radical Price (read online), where he pulls out some points that are potentially important to the educational realm as well as economics in general.
“From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free,” Anderson writes. “Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.”
This got me thinking about the “free” university model as proposed by University of the People. If they are going to be giving away their courses to certain segments of their student base, they might have the world knocking on their door. But if they are using open resources, do we know anything of the quality of those courses?
Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things, digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore.
Anderson would think that we might be wasting our time by screening resources for quality because courses delivered online would not suffer a limitation of shelf space, time or media. But the scare resource that does need to be managed for, especially when it comes to education is time. The ability of a face-to-face campus to press students through a rich educational experience in 3.5-5 years for a degree is something that needs to be paid for. That experience includes not only the content, but mentoring and coaching as to how to apply that content. Online students may receive the same content, but without the social/cultural infrastructure that “is” the university, the application of that knowledge is up to the individual. But because they are associated to at least one mentoring individual who can help assess and provide feedback, that task is much more focused than if a student were to take course content on their own and work through it without any proper assessment and individualized feedback.
To borrow an analogy from a colleague, just because you can run, doesn’t mean you can compete in the Olympics. To get to the Olympics almost everyone will need some feedback/assessment infrastructure to help apply what you know or are learning.
Edit – The Chronicle also has a piece on this book now.
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