OpenCourseWare, OpenAccess…OpenTeach?
There is an amazing wave of openness that is crashing on the academy today. The MIT faculty are largely responsible for starting this trend by pushing for OpenCourseWare (OCW). OCW is free course content. MITs professors have published an amazing 1800 free courses that anyone can download. This is a tremendous act of benevolence that I see as the tipping point for much of what will unfold in the years to come. The Harvard faculty, not be be outdone by their neighbor, recently launched OpenAccess. OpenAccess provides free access to scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles that are normally confined to either the print or digital versions of the journals in which they are published. Subscriptions to journals are very, very, very expensive, so this move dramatically disrupts the monopoly journals have on scholarship. This is also a major milestone and adds to the cascading wave of openness that is disrupting the university.
What is the next step in this progression of openness? If the content is free and the papers, or journal articles are free, then what comes next? I think the next dramatic step…wait, better…LEAP forward will come when a university steps up and offers what I’m tentatively calling OpenTeach. Now, this idea might already have come to pass and I could very well have overlooked it; if I have, then please state so in the comments and I’ll change this post. So…what is OpenTeach? OpenTeach empowers professors to teach others for FREE. It enables them to step outside of the boundaries of their university and teach other students, hopefully less privileged, for free. I think this step is coming and I look very forward to that day arriving. Imagine if people could take courses from some of the most brilliant people on the planet. Imagine if these professors were supported by their institutions (given actual faculty loading) to teach students that are not a part of their institution. Imagine the amount of goodwill that this would provide for the bold institution that embraced this concept.
Now, of course, this issue has a boatload of issues that would have to be addressed before it could take off. First, for FERPA purposes, I don’t think that the non-enrolled student would be able to join the course that the professor offers at their university. Rather, the professor would have to teach the course outside of their university. That means the prof would have to teach a course for students that are not currently enrolled at their college. Would a professor do this? I think many professors would gladly do this. However, I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of incentives. I think many professors would actually do this if they were supported to do so by their academic chair. The outside course would have to be part of their loading. I don’t think this is something that any college or university can do. Rather, I think this is something that only colleges with considerable resources (huge endowments) can do. MIT has stepped up. Harvard has stepped up. Who’s next?
