May
10
By Paolo von Schirach
May 10, 2012
WASHINGTON – Dream for a moment. Imagine a world in which any student can have access via the internet to the best teachers, providing the best instruction on any given subject. And the instruction is delivered in many different formats, allowing for the different starting skills of the students and individual pace of learning. Imagine that all this is available and provided for free or for nominal charges by dedicated NGOs that want to make education a public good accessible to all who wish to have it. Imagine the tremendous leap forward for many societies that would greatly benefit from having additional millions of educated people. More creativity, more innovation. A better world no doubt.
High quality on line education already available
Guess what: this is no longer just an aspiration. Pioneering innovators like Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy and Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University Professor who founded Udacity, are clear examples of what can be done and in fact is being done today. Salman Khan started almost by accident, by producing short on line tutorials to teach younger relatives.
Professor Thrun decided to experiment by making his Stanford University lectures available on line. He was a popular professor. He had 200 student attending his class. Much to his surprise, just days after placing his material on line he had an audience of 5,000 that turned to 10,000 and then 14,000. After many other changes and different iterations, now through Udacity, of which he is a co-founder, he recahes 160,000 students around the world. And this is about complicated computer science stuff. Khan Academy, whose material is aimed at younger students with tutorials in many more subjects, has more than 140 million views and 320,000 subscribers. These are staggering numbers.
Just the beginning
And these brilliant pioneers are just the the vanguard of an education revolution just beginning to unfold. No doubt there will be more ways to deliver content, more ways to customize it. Given these already astonishing results, I think that in just a few years we shall see a true revolution. And this will be the democratization of high quality education, education being the most valuable capital one can acquire, as it is the precondition for almost anything else in the modern world.
Accessible to all
Think for a moment of the implications of this change. Until now high quality education was considered a privilege for the super smart and the super rich. So, given what we are used to, it is hard to imagine a future world in which one’s principal source of intellectual growth is delivered free of charge or almost free of charge through a computer by some of the best instructors available. Impossible to assess all the implications and the incredibly disruptive impact that this will have on highly structured and mostly mediocre education institutions that deliver average instruction for a very high price.
Education is the most valuable asset
Indeed, we know how valuable a good education is in today’s world and how difficult it is to get it. We know that in today’s highly competitive knowledge economy how well one can master any given subject is the passport to good jobs, great careers, upward mobility and financial success. Within the current system, most highly competent individuals are the products of the best schools and the best universities. Therefore getting on the right track to a great private school and then using that as a spring board to a super university is considered an essential precondition to making it later on in life.
The problem is that this system providing excellent education is open only to a small minority of the student population: the really talented who get scholarships and the very rich who can afford its extremely high cost. The rest can aspire only to passable, mediocre or bad public education. After that, the truly motivated will go to a decent or so-so college where they will get a so-so higher education.
Only few get the best
Therefore, only a tiny sliver of the student population will get a superior education. Many more will get a mediocre education; while the majority of the population is lucky to get a high school diploma. And the cost of all this inefficient apparatus that breeds inequality keeps growing, up a point in which it will become unaffordable for most middle class students.
And bear in mind that here we are talking about the happy few. If you put together all the students who get any type of education, superior and average, these are privileged young people living in developed countries who have schools and universities they can attend. The rest of the world gets little or nothing at all. Even basic literacy is an elusive goal for hundreds of millions.
Democratizing education
But here come the likes of Salman Khan and Sebastian Thrun. These brave visionaries lead the way to a new world in which almost anybody can get a real education, not just a smattering of something delivered by mediocre instructors. Everyody can have access to the smartest, most brilliant teachers who can open up entire universes of new knowledge to any student with a computer and a decent internet connection.
This is a revolution
I am sure that many more will follow this new trend and deliver new education material on line through other innovative modalities. Therefore it is impossible to predict how education will look like 10 or 20 years from now. But one thing is clear. The ability to deliver high quality at a low price to millions is a revolution and its impact will be revolutionary. The ability to democratize learning so that it is truly accessible to all those who crave it may be one of the most dramatic and farther reaching transformations brought about by the internet era, with consequences for society, the economy, and governance that it is hard to even fathom. Our thanks should go to those who are leading the way.
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