While we’ve written and talked quite a bit about the education bubble over the past few months, a recent announcement from MIT may prove to be a game-changer.
Our institutions of higher education don’t have a monopoly on information; they started losing that around the time the time that public libraries became widespread. And these days, they no longer have a monopoly on instruction. They have given it away through their own free programs — MIT was a pioneer in that movement — and lost it to competitors like Khan Academy.
So what’s left? Contacts and credentials. Let’s look at credentials. When you spend four years at Stanford or Yale you’re paying for a degree with that institution’s name on it. Such a credential is a not a guarantee of success and happiness, but it’s at least a good head start. It is a big-ticket item, a high-prestige item. At one time, such a degree was viewed as a solid investment (and largely still is, depending on what the degree is in.)
The thinking behind major universities giving away courses was that it wouldn’t conflict with their main business, selling credentials, since the free courses can’t be applied to a degree.
But now we have this:
MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:
organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
- feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
- allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
- operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.
MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.
That “virtual community” is intriguing. MIT is going to stay in the business of both contacts and credentials, but now they’re offering two tiers of each. There is the traditional degree program and the traditional set of elite contacts that go along with it. That’s the premium level of service. And now there’s the consumer model — certification supported by an MIT-specific social network.
It will be very interesting to see how these two tiers work together. Does the consumer model help support the traditional model? Does the distributed online model become more official as time goes by? Time will tell. In any case, kudos to MIT for once again staying ahead of the curve.