5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 4/21)

The second myth: publically funded education is economically sustainable as a common good

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:

• The greater your success in widening education, the less sustainable it becomes over the long term, especially for cash-strapped governments in the developing world;
• Education provision does not function as a perfect economy. If it did - why don’t we see a radical reduction in the cost of provision - given the global demand for education. Is this a supply problem? Does this suggest a return to elitism for survival?

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:

‘’Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? …Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis…” (Drucker, Forbes Magazine, March 10, 1997, pp.126-127)

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.