A Bet On Free Education

This fantastic article from Marketing Guru Seth Godin is simply too irresistible not to share.

From Seth Godin, (blue bold emphasis mine)

``Should this be scarce or abundant?

``MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes available for free online. The marginal cost of this is pretty close to zero, so it's easy for them to share. Abundant education is easy to access and offers motivated individuals a chance to learn.

``Scarcity comes from things like accreditation, admissions policies or small classrooms.

Should this be free or expensive?

``Wikipedia offers the world's fact base to everyone, for free. So it spreads.

``On the other hand, some bar review courses are so expensive the websites don't even have the guts to list the price.

``The newly easy access to the education marketplace (you used to need a big campus and a spot in the guidance office) means that both the free and expensive options are going to be experimented with, because the number of people in the education business is going to explode (then implode).

``If you think the fallout in the newspaper business was dramatic, wait until you see what happens to education.

``Should this be about school or about learning?

``School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is 'getting it'. It's the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn't care about workbooks or long checklists.

Read the rest here.

So here's how things might shape in the future:

The laws of economics should apply: lower costs equates to higher demand.

Taxpayer funded public education may go down as free online education flourishes.

What should matter now is securing online access for the public and investments (in content and infrastructure) are likely to get focused here.

Consequently too, certificate courses will have to be reconfigured.

It's simply just amazing how free markets, underpinned by innovative technological infrastructure (likewise a product of the markets), have evolved to make society much progressive.