Unbundling education

​Some  more about the sharing economy and what it means for eduction. 

As we start to realize the benefits of the information revolution, we are seeing great efficiencies and whole new sectors being created by unbundling things that had long been bundled. While it will likely take a while for cable to get there, the world is filled with bundles that are being unbundled. (By the way, I think once aereo gets more market traction (or at least more markets), the acceleration of cable cutters will go into overdrive. Think about it, $80 year for live events and a virtual dvr + AmazonPrime for $79/year+cost of internet, you could throw in Netfilx and a couple of AppleTV downloads a month and you're still ahead by about $1000 year. Unless you love your Game of Thrones and Homeland real time.)   

Unbundling Education

Look at how Coursera is unbundling education, (most recently with its announcement of free textbooks.) Why is education a bundle? What do you think that college degree is? It's a bundle of courses that you took. You may not have taken all the same courses as someone with the same degree, and you almost certainly didn't have the same professors. But still we equate a degree being equal to other versions of that degree. Then we apply the school's brand to determine the value of that bundle. So a CS degree from MIT is not considered to be the same as a CS degree from DeVry and an MFA from Iowa is not the same as an MFA from University of Delaware.  ​

So, what are Coursera and other companies like it doing to unbundle education?  First, they're taking away the physical limitations of a classroom. YOu no longer need to confine yourself to the number of seats (or to a particular time). In fact, it should lead to the restructuring of education (at every level) entirely, where kids watch the lecture at their own time and then class time is spent on interactive activities (experiments, discussions, etc.)  And before you say that this is crazy because kids won't watch the videos, remember that just because a kid's in a classroom, doesn't mean they're listening.  ​

Second, they're taking away the disparity of teaching skills. You can attend the lectures from the best professors on a particular topic without having to attend a particular school.  So, now it becomes more incumbent on the student to learn who the best professors are. It becomes incumbent on the professors to be better teachers. And those who are better researchers than teachers, should be allowed to just be researchers. 

In the future, a person's ambition will be signaled not by the university they attended, but by the university they built for themselves.​

The non-educational purpose of higher education

Of course Universities don't just serve as educational institutions. They serve an important function as a halfway house for kids learning how to be adults. How to deal with their peers without supervision. How to be responsible without being reminded. How to make decisions and learn from other people in a new way. But it seems to me that that function may be able to be unbundled too. I could see a system in which a consortium of companies (these could be media, financial, venture funds, or technical companies) creates a "university" where kids don't have to pay. They are required to work 10 hours a week in one of the supporting companies (and required to work in more than one during their four years) or to work at least 10 hours a week in creating a new company (or write a script, produce art, you get where I'm going) which will be underwritten by the university and will have right of first refusal by the consortium companies . In addition to the internships, they will need to watch courses and attend interactive lessons and will be tested on all. Just like in current universities, they can change their emphasis, move to a different university, etc. 

Of course it's also possible that the sharing economy is also solving this need as well.  In my first post about the sharing economy, I talked about the other benefits that come with a sharing economy (beyond economic).

In a way, these services are performing a social function that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter don't: they're bringing people together in the real world. They serve as a matchmaking service for nonromantic relationships. Airbnb is not just about the room, but about the experience. Lyft is about the friendliness of the driver (and the pink mustache - on the car, not the driver). The randomness of the interactions provides a ​way to experience the real world in new ways. The emergence of the web originally led a lot of people to decry the impact it was having on real relationships. Where people were driven to virtual worlds instead of interacting with the people around them. The sharing economy is changing that again and actually making us into more social creatures. 

If Facebook allows us to keep in contact with people we have met throughout our lives, Airbnb allows us to continually expand that list. So, with these services giving us more of an ability to interact with real people, it gives young people an entree into the world of having to manage themselves (there's an App for that!) and it creates mechanisms by which people are able to randomly meet people and therefore learn new things and create new bonds.

We're a ways away from changing our core educational institutions. But, while the availability of data has created amazing gains in transparency and efficiency in most sectors, ironically, one of the least impacted facets of society has been education. Within that realm, higher education has probably seen the least amount of data-driven innovation. Given that the costs of higher education have risen 12-fold over the last 30 years, far outpacing the inflation rate, this creates several societal risks and - importantly - puts higher ed on an unsustainable footing economically and politically.