Michael Feldstein is the editor of a forthcoming volume of the journal On the Horizon that focuses on distributed learning. I’ve got an article on NIXTY that will be coming out in that journal. He asked me to post an introductory discussion of the article on his popular blog, e-Literate. My post focuses on the benefits of harnessing Web 2.0 strengths in the CMS/LMS. I write quite a bit on the importance of OpenSocial, OpenID and OpenCourseWare. I’ve cut and pasted the bit on OpenID b/c it is a little known subject, but one that we think is pretty important. To read the full post go here.

Open ID and Web 2.0 Learning:

Open ID is another Web 2.0 strength that is important for open education. Open ID is sometimes referred to as Identity 2.0. The best metaphor for Open ID is that of a driver’s license. It acts as a person-centric identity that proves who you are to other people and institutions. For example, I use my license to buy alcohol (if carded), procure credit, and drive my car. Imagine if I had one license for the pub, another license for my banker, and yet another license for my car insurance company? That would be ridiculous, but that is exactly the situation we currently have on the Web. You have one ‘license’ or unique ID – your username and password – for your email, another for PayPal, and another for Amazon. For example, I’m a member of several sites (Gmail, Reddit, Hacker News, OLDaily). Each time I visit those sites I have to login with a unique username and password. If they were all Open ID compliant (OLDaily actually is – props to Stephen), then I could just use one sign-on to access them all. What we need is one ID, or license, that allows us to gain access to all of the different sites and services on the Web. In short, our ID has to move from being site-centric to being user-centric.

What does this have to do with online learning? It signals a trend and shift away from the institution and towards the individual learner. LMS companies require a unique identifier for their educators and students. This ID and your associated work (comments, posts, learning objects) function as long as you are a user in that LMS. That is, as long as the institution continues to buy ‘seats’ for you to exist. If they stop buying space for you, then you stop existing in that space. This isn’t good for the institution, the student that graduates, or the faculty person that moves on to another university. Instead, what’s needed is a platform that supports Open ID, provides plenty of space, and allows for transitions from one role to another. Open ID will provide a tangible way for individuals to take their identity with them no matter where they go.

Stephen Downes, Martin Weller, Tony Hirst, and Gary Lewis have all been having an intriguing discussion on the business of education. Martin started it off with a great post proposing different business models (advertising, affiliates, sponsorships etc.) to support free eLearning. Stephen responded by suggesting that eLearning should be free and should not be monetized. Gary Lewis summarized things and asked them both to add more detail. I’m jumping in now because we have been struggling with this very issue for the last year.

We finally decided that you need multiple streams of revenue to be able to support a system that can ultimately empower education for everyone. The overhead is just to high to be able to do it for free without advertising or some other type of monetizing strategy. Many people don’t realize it, but running a web-based business is pretty expensive, especially if that business scales so that even a fraction of the people on the planet utilize it. Moore’s law does help with storage costs, but, still, in an increasingly video intensive context, storage and bandwidth costs are very, very, high. Additionally, if you want to provide a service that is reliable and one that educators and academic institutions feel comfortable using, then you have to make sure you can offer a decent SLA (guaranteed 99% uptime etc.). That means you have to have reliable datacenters, co-location, and people on hand to help if the site goes down or gets hacked (eg., slideshare.com with its recent bouts of denial of service attacks). These are just the basic costs and don’t even begin to cover design and engineering costs, particularly if you want to do something really innovative.

So, I guess I’m adding my thoughts to the mix. I’d love to see a platform that provided free education for all, but I just don’t see how it can happen without advertising or other revenue generating strategies. I’m with Martin in that I “don’t have the imagination” to visualize it occurring. The overhead is just too high.

That said, monetizing strategies are not inherently bad. There is much good that occurs through business processes. Paul Graham has a phenomenal video here where he talks about the brilliance of being a benevolent business. He uses several illustrations, but perhaps the most poignant is his Google example. He rhetorically asks something like, “Would Google be as good as it is if it were a ministry or non-profit?” The answer is no. It wouldn’t be such a great resource if it were a non-profit. So, even though Google is a business that uses advertising as its sole monetizing strategy, it provides an amazing amount of value to people everyday. It uses that revenue to provide new services that really help people (think Gmail). I, for one, am happy to use Google’s services and I don’t mind the advertising in the least, because I see it in the larger context. They are providing great tools for me for free. Graham’s hypothesis is that this model is ideal for both users and companies. It is a true win/win. We certainly think so.