In the end, that’s actually a pretty good model for education that adapts with the changes in larger things than one person’s career, such as an economic decline, for example… What will the hundreds of thousands of people who need to retrain in order to become employable in a field in demand? I’m betting all the demand for health care professionals will cause the health science universites that offer online programs to explode in popularity. Why wouldn’t people choose an option that’s cheaper, involves no transportation cost, and in many cases is better suited to teaching the individual and providing them further study options?

First, thanks for trying Livemocha. Glad to hear that you think it’s a game-changing model. So do we.

Second, I hear you loud and clear on the sometimes irritating volume of email notifications. I am all over it. Expect big improvements very soon.

Finally, I would be keen to hear your thoughts on the global, multi-lingual implications of your theory of “education as a platform”. I appreciate the insights you’ve shared thus far.

The “trust” issue you have analyzed regarding the gatekeepers of the media is even more relevant in academia. The disaggregated model you outline assumes the products (i.e., professors) of the old model will somehow still exist. But who will a “professor” even be in such a system? No doubt, as one poster indicated, there is a “glut” of “crap” produced by current professors in the standard publish-or-perish environment. A web-based academic future would exacerbate rather than alleviate that problem.

The open system of sharing knowledge via the internet without the interference of local bureaucracies has already been implemented. It’s called “Wikipedia,” and while it may be no more misleading than an average professor’s lecture on Shakespeare, it may not be a model for producing advanced scholarship.

Credentialing will never disappear. In the decentralized model, it would become everything. You could learn wherever you wanted, as long as it prepared you to excel at passing the tests necessary to obtain the credential. Since excelling at the test would be so crucial, one can imagine that whole institutions would spring up to guide students toward achieving their credential-oriented goals….

One other thing: “Online, the best can pick from the best, cutting out the middle man of university admissions.” It sounds nice in theory, but not every middle man is a useless parasite. That admissions crew performs a valuable function. Just how much time would instructors have to devote to culling “the best” if left to their own devices? Would there be any time left over for lecturing or research?

Educational success is not a great predictor of success in the workplace. However, it’s not a terrible predictor – and, importantly, it’s one that the employer has carte blanc to employ. Employers are prohibited from using categories like sex, age, race, what have you, and in this modern era, the value of referrals from past employment is dubious at best – too many companies give a good referral to all employees regardless of performance, to avoid catching a lawsuit from an ex-employee. The educational credential is what’s left – an easy tool that a potential employer can use to shrink hundreds of resumes to dozens, in a way for which they can’t possibly be blamed or sued.

Without the establishment of a credentialing system, though, online classes are going to remain toys. It’s important to teach an online class effectively, sure, nobody’s going to argue that. But at the end of the day, there needs to be a method of validating the knowledge of an area of study that someone has achieved regardless of the source – whether they cracked the textbooks themselves or downloaded lectures from Harvard or had it beamed directly into their noggin by space aliens.

Concerning a distributed learning system. Who will be setting the standards? Employers right or wrong look to some sort of certification/accreditation of potential employees in order to help them choose the best. Their are betters ways of determining whether a one person is better than another for a position, but I’ll leave that for another post.

For me the big issue with online classes/education is that of creating an environment which is pedagogically/andragogically sound, uses new media and technologies appropriately, has an intuitive user interface, is engaging, and meets students varied learning needs. Current Learning Management Systems (LMS) are evolving and while I find none to be a best-case tool for synchronous/asynchronous learning, I do see newer technologies such as wiki’s, blogs, chat, etc. being adopted. The futurist in me hopes that someone will finally get it right by offering either an all inclusive platform, or tool that allows multiple components from other sources to be merged into one customizable interface.

“Professors with tenure and the scholarship they carry out are the closest thing we have to an unbiased and truthful view of the world.”

Oh My Gosh.

You really did the kool-aid didn’t you?

Professors are whores who work for what ever institution pays them the most. The vast majority of them simply parrot what ever orthodoxy is currently in vogue with little or no thought to original research.

Wake up Richard. WAKE! UP!

Just as the traditional media are losing their status as gatekeepers of public discourse, so will universities lose their status as gatekeepers of knowledge. It cannot happen too quickly.

@ Jon Bischke
Why only free up from geographical restraints and not free up from time restraints as well? Independant consumption of lesson input via podcasts followed up by an asynchronous discussion sparked by the lesson.

Look for the new models to first emerge in the more market-orientated segments of learning (e.g. corporate training, adult education). Entrepreneurs, and not academics, are going to drive this change.

Those things are so valuable that their greatest practioners can be found driving cabs and screaming that Oprah should have picked them.

For all the hype, what have the folks in those fields done recently, apart from apologize for mass-murder that is.

> 2) Professors with tenure and the scholarship they carry out are the closest thing we have to an unbiased and truthful view of the world.

Not even close.

As an individual, I wouldn’t give up my old school college years for any form of distributed university, no matter how wonderful the educational opportunities. As an employer, knowing how easily anything web based can be hacked and manipulated, I wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate that showed me a bunch of collected “credentials”.

I see that Will Richardson and Jeff Jarvis have been talking recently on the issue of a distributed university. This fits in with my earlier discussion about a low-cost or no-cost higher education. Again, everyone wants to point out that…