With all the talk about the cost of higher education, there is an underlying current bringing about a radical change in education. This quiet, yet revolutionary force, is both directly and indirectly changing the bottom line in the price of attaining education. Behind the curtains in higher education are Open Educational Resources.
"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others." (Hewlett Foundation)
Recently, well-known author Anya Kamenetz covered Open Educational Resources and various pioneer learning start-ups in her free book The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Education. It is over 100 pages long full of online free or highly affordable knowledge resources. The OER movement is not only growing: it is exploding.
What perhaps is overlooked in daily conversations is that the most important aspect about OER is that it enables the best quality knowledge material to travel free of charge to the most remote and underserved places in the world. Education is no longer only for the elite privileged few; or for those saddled with a lifelong debt burden to achieve it. Education is now for everyone and anyone driven, motivated, inspired and ready to seek it out online. Money is no longer a prerequisite to a quality education -- only a computer and an internet connection remain.
We are part of a new era. From free learning sources such as MIT OpenCourseWare, to fully formed tuition-free degree programs such as those offered by University of the People, the phrase "burdensome tuition" is becoming a phrase of the past. Worldwide disparities in educational access based on economic situation or geographic restriction are being leveled out.
Think what a world we are becoming -- a world where money is not required in order for individual and collective intelligence to be expressed and compounded. Removing money from the equation, we will see in a very short time what universal affordable education will achieve in changing, brightening and modifying the world we live in.
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It is good to make content available so that interested people can learn.This is the starting point. I would note that on-line is convenient but not necessary, you can also learn material by reading books and journals on your own or with some guidance by somebody who knows the material. It is how I have learned most things.
You need students who are interested, motivated, capable of learning the material, and who do the work to master it.
What we really need is a trustworthy credential / certificate granting institution(s) that can evaluate the student's knowledge so that they can build upon this mastery in the job marketplace.
The college also offers prior learning assessment (PLA), pioneered over 40 years ago in the US through the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL). PLA is an individualized approach to evaluating what someone knows and can accomodate a wide range of college-level knowledge and skills, including workplace learning.
With support from the Lumina foundation, CAEL has partnered with ACE to offer PLA services more broadly and to provide a permanent record of the credit recommended. This expands the opportunity folks beyond the current institutions that offer PLA services and will help to make this credit more portable.
Issues around transferrability and intellectual turf still make some of this difficult. For now finding the right institution, whether it be Empire State College, Thomas Edison State College or one of the for profits enables the recognition of learning. Higher education can do better and some institutions are poised to move into open learning.
I am working far outside of my education. I have been handling "certification" by getting articles published in referee'd professional journals. I can then refer to the articles in my resume.
I'd say let's reinvent the whole thing, but that isn't how it ever happens. The new way of learning will emerge in its own time.
Ultimately, the fact is that higher education costs just rise and rise, denying to so many students even the ambition to attend. I love that anybody could be able to access online education, but I think that a classroom experience - provided, of course, that one has a good teacher and $$$ gets devoted to academics, not sports and publicity - is so important in the transmission of ideas. 'Classroom' doesn't quite encompass it - I'm referring to the exchange of ideas and debate that can happen in a forum like a classroom; I learnt so much from open discussion as a university student. But of course, not all classes or professors foster this, and I think it's in part because of a spirit that generally devalues the learning experience in favor of "pragmatism", homogenization, and profit.