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On Ducks and Thought Experiments in the Higher Education Debate

Submitted by Jeff Rogers on Fri, 07/15/2011 - 4:12pm

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck, or is it a simulacrum of the duck? Trapped inside that old saw of induc(k)tive reasoning is a fundamental question about “duckness”: in just what characteristic, exactly, does the quality of being a duck consist? Appearance? Sound?

By way of analogy, a similar thought experiment is afoot in higher education. As traditional, brick-and-mortar universities explore new web-based/distance learning alternatives and new web-based/distance learning alternatives explore the possibilities of degree granting and accreditation à la the traditional brick-and-mortar university, both sides and plenty of third-party pundits are hashing out the question of just what, exactly, is the constitutive and defining quality of the university educational “experience”. Does the essential element consist in the rigor of the curriculum or in the chance for virtually unlimited interaction with peers? Is it the quality of the instruction? The chance for one-on-one engagement with professors? Could the degree itself, in fact, be the defining element of a university education? Or is it a process of intellectual socialization that bears no more direct relationship to the paper degree than the training of a world-class athlete bears to a piece of colored metal on a fancy ribbon?
 
Getting back to the simpler world of ducks and things duck-like, one can say that it is much easier to agree on whether something qualifies as a duck if we already have a well-established and agreed-upon idea of what a duck is. Unfortunately, the question as it applies to higher education is much more complicated than spotting webbed feet and bills and feathers. That said, the pressures currently in play on both sides of the debate about the university (and its online equivalent) may be pushing us toward a resolution.
 
For the sake of argument and convenience, we can roughly categorize the exploratory forays made by traditional universities into distance learning as “top-down” approaches in contrast with the more “bottom-up” approaches that projects as diverse as P2PU, the Kahn Academy, and the University of the People are taking to the question of web-based higher education. We have frequently discussed the top-down efforts in this space, giving particularly attention to the University of California’s developing distance learning initiatives. Generally speaking, the top-down approach of the traditional university is driven by a combination of perceived financial necessity and technological possibility and has in its favor the resources represented by a diverse body of content experts and established instructors, a nationally or globally recognized brand, the imprimatur of accreditation, and the ability to grant a degree with an established value. On the other hand, strong institutional resistance to change, a reluctance to risk devaluing the brand or degree, and the difficulty of dealing with the complex variety of stakeholders in the traditional university all tend to work against the top-down model.
 
What the more bottom-up approach lacks in institutional resources may well be compensated for through increased flexibility and a greater openness to risk and experimentation. The bottom-up initiatives see a tremendous market (indeed, a global need) for low-cost, effective higher education, and they are coming up with a variety of peer-driven delivery and assessment models. What the open-access P2PUs and Kahn Academies of the world may ultimately most lack, however, is the status of accreditation and the ability to grant degrees.
 
Shai Reshef’s University of the People, which was recently written up in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, is looking to buck that trend and be the first tuition-free, open-access university to grant bachelor’s and associate’s degrees and have American accreditation. And if UoPeople, as it’s called, makes that status jump, it will still not look quite like a duck, but it will be accredited like one.  And among the many likely results of a success like the one that Reshef and UoPeople hope for, not the least significant, surely, will be increased pressure on the traditional universities to move more aggressively into the distance learning and (more) open access markets.
 
Were that to be the case, we might well see the top-down and bottom-up approaches converging on some middle ground of web-based education, at which point the simulacrum of the thing and the thing itself would be virtually indistinguishable. At that point, any distinction beyond looking like a higher ed duck and being accredited like one might cease to be relevant.
 
    

A Meeting of the University and the Gift Economy

Submitted by Rebecca R. Falkoff on Thu, 02/03/2011 - 5:57pm

In a NY Times Magazine article entitled “Valuing $0,” Rob Walker considers the intersections of gift and market economies in our digital present, where hundreds of millions of unpaid content creators update their Facebook statuses, edit Wikipedia pages, upload photographs and videos, and author blog posts, and some of the most successful new-media enterprises have offer their services for "free" in order to capitalize on such user-generated content. 

A new institution—Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), whose name alone announces its embrace of technological, rather than traditional forms of literacy, represents an experiment with this gift economy in higher education. A “grassroots educational project” founded on the principles of openness, community, and peer learning, P2PU offers courses taught by volunteers--both expert and amateur. The courses, which generally run for six-week cycles, leverage educational materials available online to enable “learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.”

Since its launch in 2009, P2PU has grown from six courses to the more than forty being taught this cycle, which began on January 26. Course offerings from the university’s three schools, the School of Social Innovation, the School of the Mathematical Future, and Webcraft, include “Collaborative Lesson Planning,” “Conflict Resolution,” and “Drupal Theming and Tweaking.”

While P2PU courses are uncredited, the university is working to develop forms of recognition--which may ultimately resemble the liking of a Facebook status or the linking of a tweet. The website explains: “We want learners to get recognition for their achievements, but we don't issue any kind of accredited or official certificates ourselves. We are working on cross-accreditation with a few partners, but P2PU certificates are more ‘artworks’ than ‘degrees.’” This understanding of the art of learning itself echoes a work Walker introduces in "Valuing $0": Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which advises artists and writers that enduring creation must not be tailored to the demands of the market, but should instead be produced in a gift economy.  

Uncredited, online, and led by amateurs as well as experts, P2PU obviously offers an education very different from that of Berkeley. But it will nonetheless be an interesting initiative to follow--in part because it is modeled on the gift economy that has seen remarkable successes in the age of digital technologies. 

In a recent Lab Blog post, my colleague Jeff Rogers notes that because the first generation of OpenCourseWare projects developed at traditional universities were typically funded by finite grants, they faced the challenge of sustainability. One possibility for a sustainable future for OpenCourseWare in the next generation "2.0" would be to rely distance learning courses offered for credit. Another, that demonstrated by P2PU, might involve a flattening out of academic hierarchies, so both learning and teaching are open to all. The losses incurred in such a model seem obvious, but the gains may also be significant. And while it remains to be seen whether P2PU has staying power, what is clear is that the institution is offering something radically different, a model of education that resembles not a traditional university, but some of the most successful businesses to emerge from the age of digital technologies.