radical proposal for education
I argued in a recent rant that open data/open source is a way to make society in general (and Canada in particular) more nimble, more adaptive, more able to meet challenges & find solutions to problems.
Government’s job is viewed differently by different people, but in general it always suffers the same constraiint: how do you pay for services it would like to provide? This tends to be a major tension between left and right (in Canada at least). Most agree that it would be a good thing to: provide free university education to all who qualify; to provide free healthcare to all who need it; to provide free daycare etc. The left tends to say we should make taxpayers pay for these things; the right says: government cannot afford to pay for these things; if people want them, they should pay themselves. Maybe we can pay for some of it, but not all.
This is certainly the case with universities: we’d love to have zero tuition, but that’s not feasible; in fact we can’t afford to pay tuitions as it is, we need to charge more.
What if Canada funded one university to do what MIT is doing with MIT OpenCourseware, and UC Berkley is doing with podcasting?: open up the education process. Anyone who wishes to get access to university teaching for free may do so - just download the courses; download the materials.
A further suggestion: a cross-university effort to produce free & freely accessible online text books (wikibooks?) for major courses: Physics 101, Bio 101, Calc 101 … etc.
Distance learning easily implemented.
This means a very low cost per head solution to education. Anyone can access the educational information for free. Result: possibility of having thousands? millions? educated for “free.” Grassroots groups could develop to “implement” courses.
Feasible? Do you think self-learing students would use the resource in a useful way? Seems to me this is an important area that needs to be pushed by someone.
Sounds wonderful, Hugh. I don’t see any argument against it, but I’m sure there are plenty of wackos who will find some.
Comment by Paula Berinstein — March 18, 2006 @ 1:12 pm
I’d love to be able to follow some courses like that. However, in the majority of cases people will be “going to” university for a diploma they can use when looking for a job so you’d need a way (tests at a minimum) to validate that a student has properly used the free courses selected. There’s also a variety of support services a university includes when selecting courses, facing problems with the content, etc. Some of it can be taken care off with some more internet socialsoft/collaboration goodness but not all so there’d still be a cost beyond producing the courses. Much much cheaper though so yeah, good concept.
Comment by Patrick — March 29, 2006 @ 6:14 pm
but “getting a diploma” is a silly sort of reason for getting schooling - except that it serves a purpose: it lets employers know that you’ve jumped these hoops. some people (like sylvain, for instance) are more interested in what you’ve actually done than your diplomas - hence the requirement for google searches to see where you’ve been active in open source projects. much better guage of your open source credentials than a diploma.
but the idea is not necessarily to make the whole schooling experience free, but rather to make schooling info/data free for those who want it. support systems (for pay perhaps) could be built on top of a free schooling platform , why not?, but the idea is to not restrict the base info sources because of artificial reasons (diplomas, testing etc).
Comment by hugh — April 2, 2006 @ 2:19 pm
“[…] in fact we can’t afford to pay tuitions as it is, we need to charge more.”
Should I remind you that France, to name only one, has an excellent public, and free, higher education system? The question is not feasibility but the will of citizens to pay for it. I believe the UFP’s proposition of making education more focused on talents and potential might increase the will for citizens to pay for it.
Comment by xSmurf — April 9, 2006 @ 10:41 pm
yes but in France, for instance, only some can get into the Right schools. but my point is about efficiency & access - if you make all school materials available, online, for free, you would have huge efficiencies …
the point about “can’t afford” should have said, as you suggest, “if our society believes it cannot afford …” etc.
Comment by hugh — April 10, 2006 @ 7:13 am