Meta-Education
Did you see the headline? Stanford professors this fall opened up their class on AI from 175 local students to 23,000 global students. On locally-proctored exams, most global students scored similar to those students paying $40k/year at Stanford. In speaking on the issue, author Michael Feldstein of Cengage Learning remarked:
If individual professors can begin to certify student competence, that begins to unravel the entire fabric of the institution itself.
This sounds all very exciting and familiar to me. 5 years ago I presented down at the national Educause convention a crazy vision for a meta-university framework that could radically alter the structure of HiEd by allowing professors to become their own university, moving from cogs in an outdated institutional machine, to knowledge entrepreneurs in a modern learning universe.
This change in teaching could have a ripple effect of moving students from paying exorbitant all-or-nothing university tuition entrance feeds that have risen 4x faster than cost of living, to intelligent, self-directed learning agents who pay by the feed from the best university in the world.
Open education and massive open online courses are not new, but it is good that we are finally seeing acceptance of their possibilites, even within the scope of the current university walled gardens. Considerations…
- Our world has a lot of challenges to face, challenges that need educated global citizens to adequately address.
- Time/attention is our highest currency, currency that is wasted continuing to force single-channel sage-on-the-stage grandstanding inherent in traditional lecture hall formats vs nonlinear lecture captures and and anytime learning via podcast/rich media formats.
- Keeping the world’s knowledge locked up behind tuitional door charges that produce smart graduates in lifelong indentured servitude to student loan debt is not an effective means of aligning future generations to be truly invested in their world’s success.
- What if optimal learning environments were not traditional single-channel classrooms at all, but intelligent learning gyms combining exercise and education to enhance learning capacity and physical health?
The world has needed a new contract of higher education for decades. We all know it, yet we continue to let real reform be side-tracked by hot-button side issues. Luminaries like Ken Robinson has preached the value of radical learning revolutions for years now.
Here is one lifelong learner glad to see it finally coming.
