The idea of college kids congregating in libraries on college campuses will likely never go away, but a revolution in higher learning is underway that can shake up the university system in the United States and around the world.
The trend of putting college courses online for free is exploding, and the idea of a college education may never be the same. That’s probably a good thing, as the cost of a college education has been spiraling out of control. We believe that the emergence of self-education through free online tools will be one of the great trends of the 21st century.
Steve Klinsey is the founder and CEO of New Mountain Capital and has been very active in education reform for years. He has published a very interesting commentary in Baron’s discussing this topic.
The American Dream is increasingly blocked by steadily rising college costs, and America’s student debt stands at more than $1 trillion. Fortunately, the combination of readily available technology and a simple regulatory change could create a low-cost or even a no-cost alternative path toward a college degree. The edX program recently announced by MIT and Harvard points the way toward a massively open online course movement.
EdX is designed to make MIT and Harvard college courses widely available online, building on the MITx program that already offers MIT courses free of charge online to any student anywhere. EdX will support students’ learning and grade their work, and a certificate from the program will be granted for successful course completion. EdX is also offering to give its online-course-delivery software to other educational institutions that want to broadly distribute their courses.
Last fall, Stanford offered an introductory Artificial Intelligence course for free, online. It reported that 160,000 students, from high schoolers to retirees, enrolled from 175 countries, and 22,000 students completed the rigorous course.
Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and others are pursuing similar paths. The Open University system in the United Kingdom and Western Governors University in the U.S. have been pioneering this philosophy as well.
Digital technology can revolutionize the cost structure of education, just as it has for other forms of information. However, regulation needs to change to enable the advance, particularly in the area of accreditation.
He goes on to discuss ways that some sort of certificate of completion can be given to people who complete these courses online, and how the government can incentivize universities to come up with a standardized system to handle these certificates so that prospective employers and other universities can count on them.
This is yet another example of the tremendous power the the internet and social media. The exponential effect this can have on global learning is simply staggering and also very exciting.
Hopefully, the days of ridiculously priced college educations will be coming to an end.
