Opensource is by now familiar enough a concept.  Its opposite is strictly limiting access to content and code. It may never be a matter of either/or but rather of both/and. If, as Stewart Brand said, “information wants to be free…and information wants to be expensive, the tension will not go away,” then nowhere is this more true than in the case of higher education. You can read it in the mission statements of the world’s top research institutions. Often astoundingly expensive and nearly impossible to access (for the average student), these institutions are nevertheless self-conscious of their responsibility to diffuse knowledge as far and as widely as they can. Increasingly they see the possibility of opensource courseware as the means to fulfill this mission—while also increasing their name recognition home and abroad.

These brand names of higher education—France’s Ecole Normale Supérieure, UK’s Oxbridge, and the US’ Ivy League, to name just a few—are able to attract a large pool of applicants and select the best candidates (and, at least in the US, charge a high premium) because the quality of the education they offer is thought to reside largely in the stimulating residential life and peer-to-peer and teacher-to-student relationships. These preserves of knowledge and world-class research are possible on the condition of keeping most applicants out. But, it seems, they are not the least bit worried that sharing the form and content of their courses will make their leafy campuses obsolete. If the value of these degrees is directly proportionate to the number of people who are turned away, there is nothing ineherently unscalable about the content of the courses they offer there.

With respect to making course content publicly available, MIT has probably the most extensive program. Launched in 2001, the goal of MIT OpenCourseWare was to make all MIT courses—undergraduate and graduate—online and public.  Apparently, the project did not meet with too much opposition from faculty (in fact, quite the opposite), perhaps because professors retain the authorship rights.  Now, you can find courses, the notes, assignments, exams, and sometimes even audio materials from top professors in almost every department.  What’s more, in 2005, MIT spearheaded the OpenCourseWare Consortium, where a truly global group of universities have agreed to make at least 10 courses each publicly available. With a slightly different content focus, France’s ENS, with its high-profile public mission, made an early move towards knowledge diffusion with its EnSavoirs site.  You can listen to seminars and lectures given by world-class thinkers on almost any topic of interest at this very searchable site (mostly in French but some in English).

Calling all Autodidacts!

What’s the caveat?  These opencourseware sites are non-certificate and non-degree granting; the cachet of a degree is still reserved for the highly-selective group. It didn’t take long for someone to realize that the real advantage of this movement could be realized by offering a structured degree to students who cannot otherwise access high quality education. That’s just what Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef hopes to do with University of the People. Recently launched, it will be the first online global degree granting university (once accredited).

Is it going to make MIT obsolete? There are reasons to doubt it. What it will do is leverage the new availability of information and couple that with online peer and professor interaction (their model calls for using volunteer services of qualified educators) to make for a very scalable and very low-cost education.  Helping the drive towards low-cost and high quality educational materials are companies like Flat World Knowledge, publishers of user-adaptable opensource textbooks.  (They make money by offering students complimentary services.) According to Reshef:

[T]he open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free, and we know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.

Yes, so far the majority of available materials are anglophone, but, witnessing the international scope of the OpenCourseware consortium, we can expect that to equilibrate somewhat in the near future, especially since many of the world’s most under-served students are not from anglophone countries.

Let us know in the comments if you have other favorites you’d like to share.

Deborah Goldgaber

Photo by gadl / CC BY-SA 2.0