Free education, but what cost?

 

Last year, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Google’s top research laboratory, made a graduate course he was teaching at Stanford University available online, free. Not much of a story here surely, except that Stanford would normally charge an undergraduate £33,200 a year in tuition fees for such a course. Ordinarily such a privilege would only be available to a handful of students; it is now open to anyone with an internet connection. So far, 160,000 people from 190 countries have signed up.

In anyone’s book, that’s a pretty impressive feat. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently committed £37 million to produce free online teaching. This has gone beyond simple online lectures to include online tutorial sessions and homework assignments. As usual, Ivy League institutions are leading the world in the exploration of new ways of teaching and learning.

In the UK, remote access learning has had a more modest trajectory, but here too more and more learning resources are being delivered online. Clearly, remote access learning has huge potential. It can cut costs for both the provider and user, allow more flexible learning, and enable learners to receive the very best in academic teaching across the globe. Not everyone is convinced, and a number of well-founded concerns have been raised, not least the question of how universities will charge fees if the world’s best teachers are online. But are there other important aspects of the nature of learning that are being overlooked?

There are a reasons that universities exist as bricks and mortar as well as digital entities. The first is historic, but the second is the continuing value that students and employers place on the ‘student experience’. Admittedly, employer interest in this ‘experience’ is probably a little more prosaic, but it is still extremely important for graduates to understand employer concerns as they look to enter an increasingly competitive graduate jobs market. The Association of Graduate Recruiters has regularly found that employers believe graduates lack "soft skills", such as team working and communications. However, can such skills be better learnt in the drafty lecture hall or in the vast expanse of the digital world. Surely to improve inter-personal skills, we need genuine inter-personal interaction?

What we learn is only ever half the battle. How we communicate this is equally important. For this, the university degree it its current format is likely to exist for some time. However, once the technology genie is out of the bottle, it rarely goes back in, and it seems certain that free online learning will be further explored by pioneering institutions. The challenge will be to develop courses that effectively combine the learning of technical information with ways to develop the communications skills of future generations of learners. 

John Hood

Consultant

john@linstockcommunications.com