I asked that question in 2001 and as a result, I founded EDUIT in 2001 as part of a start-up I was part of back then. EDUIT was originally founded to bring together corporate funding for scholarships, to help students get certification training in order to access jobs after graduating from high school. The experience left me with a very bitter taste about the certification industry and it’s been my goal to change it, and over time I realized that we could also change global education. Guess you can say I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to formal education models of learning. For the last five years we have been focused on trying to get U.S. institutional buy-in for EDUITs idea for a global change in learning with little success. Our ideas were met with resistance, because what I described was beyond an individuals paradigm or perceived as trying to usurp their educational domains. Over the last year a massive paradigm shift has occurred as a result the acceptance of the global warming crisis and the belief that we can implement global solutions. A global education solution that will allow all to learn anything, anytime and anywhere, will be significantly easier than any geoengineering solution currently being researched and it will cost significantly less too. Also, over the last couple of years some key books such as The World Is Flat (which play a key role in helping to reshape our vision), Disrupting Class, and most recently The World is Open have played an important role in helping to changing a global paradigm allowing an acceptance of an innovated global solution for education. There also been an explosion in Open Education Resources (OER) and over the last couple of months a move for free and open education in the U.S. and Europe. All the pieces are now in place for a massive reorganization of global education. Three months ago I decided to go public with our vision and to focus our attention on Asia and inparticular India and China, and to explore positioning them as possible leaders for ushering in a new era for global education. EDUIT’s eSingularity is an initiative that draws on today’s existing technology, pushing the boundaries of these technology, combining them in innovative ways in order to develop the tools to bring the benefits of education to everyone, to inspire a love for learning in play and improve the quality of life for the people in India and Asia. Our aim is to develop a platform that will cross functional, drawing on the infrastructure of several channels in order to deliver individualized content to learners, that is very simple to use, and draws upon exiting OER content easily accessible on the internet but focused on video and T.V. resources already in existence.

Welcome to the eSingualrity… the moment when all learning and education is freely available and accessible to all.

Our vision is simple promote the vision of “laaa” learn anything, anytime, anywhere. How by just spending 5 minutes a day sharing the vision with others. Over the next year this movement will become a crescendo for global education change and will play an important role.

Growing the movement to a million members is easy. Become a fan and recommend it to all your friends. If just ONE joins and repeat the process we will double the penny weekly.

We all know education is important. It must be made free and available to all.

We are trying to hack together all the things a university does with volunteers and social software so education can be free. Volunteers are organizing learners into learning groups, with meeting times, assignments, and assessment. This is a volunteer-driven project based on the model of peer learning. Sign ups for a number of pilot courses are now open at p2pu.org. In the pilot phase we’re running courses such as Behavioral Economics to Copyright for Educators.

Okay I have time for one point… many, perhaps most universities, don’t even give much value from the face-to-face discussions. Outside of elite courses and universities, students are too unmotivated and class sizes are too large for the discussions to be worth much. Sadly, that has been my (UK-based) experience anyway. With the advent of the Internet, I can’t help but feel that the majority of university education is an enormous waste of time and money. For most students, your ideas have the potential to better students’ existing university experience, not simply equal it.

My blog post on this topic:
http://www.windwil.com/2009/08/idea-30-open-source-peer-to-peer.html

I think two issues are really worth of a lot of attention. The first is the credentialing process. The answer to your friend’s question is that even though you could arguably get just as good of an education for “$1.50 in late fees at the public library” or the modern web-enabled equivalent what you don’t get is the degree from MIT. Until the credentialing process is overhauled we’re going to see parallel value tracks where education with credentials is valued on one level and education without credentials is valued at a different, and much lower, level. And of course, the reason why this has been historically slow to change is that, to loosely quote Machievelli, those who will lose are certain of their loss and those who will gain are uncertain of their gain.

The other is whether we can shift to an effective web-based delivery of learning. Many people think that web-based learning will never be as good as the historical face-to-face method of learning. I disagree. In fact, I think that at one point in the not-too-distant future it will be apparent that web-based learning will actually be better (more engaging, more effective, etc.) than face-to-face learning. There are so many things that can be done with web-based learning that are either impossible or logistically difficult face-to-face (e.g., assessment, p2p learning, etc.). The gap is narrowing and while online learning has improved rapidly in the last decade, traditional in-person learning has not changed much.

There’s a $2 trillion industry here ripe for some incredible disruption and it’s fun to be playing an active role in that. I’ve written a lot more about this on our blog which you are welcome to read here: http://blog.edufire.com/author/jon/

Thanks again Mike for the great conversation starter.

The second distinction is that useful instruction in the above endeavors can be thought of as occurring in two modalities, one being the basic instruction in techniques and subject matter and tools and detail, and the other through mentorship in the practices and processes.

With those two insights, the most important distinctions between the freely available online courseware and paying to attend elite universities become apparent; while the online materials can offer subject matter, they are poor mechanisms for mentorship and training in the practice.

It’s like trying to learn to play soccer by yourself, versus going to a camp where you can play and be coached by a series of World Cup champions, and play full games with full teams on a regular basis. Without the elite coaches, you might learn to juggle a ball impressively, but you’re unlikely to ever be a champion league player without being in the environment practicing the actual game with elite players for ~10k hours.

The real value is in being immersed in the environment where you can learn through example and coaching and practically living with these technical superstars who have real experience. You can also point to the value of investments in laboratory and equipment and software infrastructure which you will never have in your apartment, as well as access to grant funds and agencies to subsidize technical efforts, but those pale in comparison.

Unfortunately, what works for you doesn’t work for everyone, and especially for every subject. It’s powerful for the subjects where it works, particularly in business, social sciences and philosophy. It’s an experience every student should have, but the Socratic Method alone is measurably no better than lectures alone are in teaching relatively static concepts of basic mathematics and sciences, and it won’t engage students who can’t effectively participate at the speed of a lively classroom debate.

The cornerstones of all education are in determining a the optimal method of teaching a subject to a student and effectively applying that method.