Yes, universities have been around since medieval times and are one of a handful of organisations that survived the industrial revolution. Why should this be any different in the knowledge economy? The reality is that technology has succeeded in restructuring pedagogy and there is no reason why it can’t do so again. In deconstructing the myth I refer to one substantive example of technology precipitated change that has altered the pedagogy of the university in fundamental ways. I’m referring to the inception of the large-scale distance education universities. Two observations:

The massification of education as a publicly funded system has achieved considerable success in widening access, with impressive results evidenced by the exponential growth in the participation rates for higher education after the Second World War. However the long term sustainability of higher education is coming into question. The trouble with our traditional model is:

I contend that the economic model for higher education is fundamentally broken. The increase in student fees in the United States over the past decade has been in excess of the national inflation index. How long will the system be able to sustain itself?

We are now twenty year’s away from Drucker’s predictions in that famous interview in Forbes magazine back in 1997 where he predicted that “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive …” (March 10, 1997, pp.126-127). These predictions were made just before the the hype and subsequent bursting of the dot com bubble. Drucker’s predictions became the Trojan Horse for many commentators arguing for the transformation of the university to survive in the e-world. Less cited are the real reasons for Drucker’s concerns, namely:

The deconstruction of these myths set up the value proposition for free content. It is certainly plausible that we can reduce the design and development costs of asynchronous learning materials, while improving quality by an order of magnitude through mass collaboration adhering to the principles of self organisation. Moreover, we could see new (de)institutional arrangements emerging from the free cultural works movement that supplement or compete with the traditional educational models. This is possible because of deep seated changes we are seeing in the World Wide Web. In the “old days” the web was this amazing information resource where you would go out and find what you needed. Today, information finds you. The same information we may choose to co-create as individuals through the read-write web.

There is nothing new in these ideas - they are well documented in the literature. My concern is that the traditional academy does not have a good track record in educational innovation and is one of the reasons I have taken a short leave of absence from the academy. I want to see whether it’s possible to achieve sustainable innovation with free content from the “outside” - because it’s important for humanity. In justification of my assertion, I should point out that the big university icons that have pioneered the Open Education Resources (OERs) movement have adopted non-free content licenses. What’s the point of OERs that regulate the very freedom they are supposed to encourage? This is a contradiction in terms. It’s important that we get this right - our academic freedom depends on it.

Stated differently - Assuming the freedom culture achieves a free version of the education curriculum, what are the implications for your institution?

Yes, you’ve guessed it — I have been accused of disregarding quality and its importance in education.

I usually make this statement challenging those OER projects that have adopted the Non-Commercial (NC) restriction in their choice of license. First of all, quality has nothing to do with the freedom of a resource. In my experience of education, quality is a function of the design and processes implemented during the development of those resources. Quality is not a function of the commercial restrictions placed on a resource. In fact, these commercial restrictions limit essential freedoms to widen access to education, not to mention the incompatibility with the growing number of resources available under free content licenses which you can legally mix and match. Free content must be available to sell because we should not deny any individual the freedom to earn a living. This is the cornerstone of a modern economy. Besides, competition encourages quality and I would argue that we should encourage commercial activity to promote the quality of free content.

However, my major concern is the waste of human effort in many OER projects which essentially render the products almost useless for the very people they are intended to serve. I’ve yet to find a set of lecture notes developed by another teacher that I can use without the need for adaptation for my local context or personal style of teaching. The problem is that adaptation requires effort and consequently incurs cost. It would be nice if I could find bits and pieces of free content that I could mix and match thus reducing my personal effort in the adaptation process - in other words creating a digital mash-up from free content for my learners. The problem with the NC restriction is that you cannot mix the NC materials with any of the “copyleft” content licenses because you are creating a derivative work. Effectively the NC restriction shuts off modifications and adaptations by leveraging on the availability of existing investments in free content.

One advantage of a poor quality in a free-content resource is that you have the freedom to improve it!

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and I suspect that they’re constraining innovation in education. I am an eLearning practitioner and have previously been responsible for leading eLearning strategy in the university environment and have extensive experience with many LMSs - so I’m not an eLearning luddite with a nostalgic reluctance to adopt technology in education. On the contrary, I firmly support Sugata Mitra’s advice that we must use the most advanced digital technologies for the most disadvantaged learners. I’m on the side of eLearning here.

My disillusionment with LMSs fuels speculation among my peers and colleagues. I see the looks of surprise when I chat with my colleagues suggesting that LMSs are the barrier to eLearning. Their unspoken diagnosis of a temporary bout of digital amnesia is tangible. I observe the disappointment most among my free software associates that have slaved for years in the implementation of free software LMS solutions. In my view, we made an error in judgment assuming that unrestricted access to the source code of free software LMSs would facilitate innovation in eLearning. Unfortunately we have reached the point where every eLearning problem is a nail - because the only tool we have on campus is a large LMS hammer.

I think we can learn a lot from the Personalised Learning Environment cohort and the work on the eFramework - essentially a description of a web services architecture for eLearning. However this work is essentially a framework specification not an implementation. Given our experiences on the eLearning XHTML project, which has developed an authoring tool using internationally accepted specifications for interoperability, I’m not too optimistic that we will see an e-framework implementation as mainstream technology very soon. I have yet to see an elegant deployment of the LMS/SCORM specifications in any LMS (both proprietary and open source). When you view a SCORM import in all the LMSs I have tested - you feel that you are viewing alien content that is not part of the instructional strategy.

Why go through the pains of an SCORM export/import when you can simply upload and reference the relevant web content on a server using W3C protocols? (Even better, start using RSS/RDF content feeds.) The reason is that some local authority has taken responsibility to manage your freedoms to educate. We don’t tolerate these intrusions in the traditional classroom, yet under elearning we accept this in the name of cost-efficiency (or some other “justifiable” reason). This is why LMSs won’t survive - they are not aligned with the Web 2.0 culture of enabling individuals to teach as they see fit. LMSs are typically organisational installations and restrict educational freedom to work as individuals across institutional boundaries. In my view, this is why we will witness exponential growth in the technologies that service these educational needs. The phenomenal growth in Youtube, MySpace, Open Wiki installations, Flickr being an early example of the shift from organisation to you as individual.

You may be wondering what this has to do with free content, but it’s an important debate. We have to figure out ways in which we will deliver free content to our learners. I’m not too optimistic that interoperability specifications are going provide the solution. We’ve got to get smarter.