Free school for all
What follows is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve had a draft saved to my blog for a while with the intention of polishing it up and publishing it. Although it’s not as final as I’d like, I feel it’s good enough to convey my idea. I hope you enjoy it.
A free, online community of instructors and students striving to spread knowledge as much as possible
I’d like to build an online community focused on education. I envision a community that creates and perfects lectures on specific topics. These topics would be categorized into areas of learning similar to the traditional college curriculum. The service would be free and open source. The goal is to remove the financial barrier to entry that restricts higher education to those with sufficient funds.
To provide such a service, processes must be created to promote content creation, collaboration, and learning. Content creation begins by capturing a lesson on video, continues to an editing process, and continues with an indefinite number of revisions. If all goes according to plans, a high quality education will be available to anyone willing to learn.
Video capture
An expert begins by creating a lesson. A lesson is simply a video recording of a lecture. There will be no formal recording process. I’d like to be able to send anyone wishing to teach a lesson a cheap HD camera (something like the Flip) and a microphone, they would record their lesson and mail everything back to us for publishing. This way, instructors would not have to purchase or rent video equipment. The only cost incurred is shipping. Simple instructions would be required to get fairly decent video footage — how to setup a mic, positioning the camera, lighting conditions, etc.
Editing
After raw footage is obtained, the publishing process begins. At this stage, instructors are free to contribute as much or as little as they’d like. Members of the community can work together to create a final product. Publishing would entail editing, compressing, uploading, and adding metadata to make the lesson more accessible. After the publishing process is complete, there will be a raw video and an edited video. Both of these will be available in various formats and compression levels through streaming video and download. Metadata that helps to identify the content of the lesson would also be available in both machine-readable and human-readable formats.
Students could view, discuss, and annotate course content. Anyone can volunteer to teach a specific topic not just teachers. Anyone is free to give lectures and get feedback from the community.
Instruction
Students would be able to watch videos (or listen to audio) any time they’d like, but they’ll inevitably have questions or comments. For this reason, there would need to be some kind of message board for students and experts to work things out. I imagine these message boards functioning similar to online forums. Forums could contain more detailed information on specific ideas, corrections, further reading, and suggestions.
Feedback
Inevitably, bad content will be published. For this reason, students will need to be able to give feedback. Students could explain their frustration or sucess and attach some kind of value to this: eg. a rating. This would give each lecture some kind of value that could be used to filter out bad content.
I would really love to see anyone be able to learn about anything and everything that interests them — for free. While this kind of education may not be as good as face to face instruction, I feel there’s a great deal to be gained from something like this.
In conclusion, here are some notes from my brainstorming session.
Organization:
- Allow people to create, rate, improve on degree paths
- Provide a way to organize different perspectives from different professors from different backgrounds on each topic
Roles:
- Students
- Teachers
- Media producers
- Critics
- Architects (of degree paths)
Differences in relation to traditional school:
- No degree programs
- No diplomas
- No salaried professors
- No classrooms, buildings, parking lots, etc
- No prerequisites
Advantages:
- Minuscule overhead relative to traditional school — no administration costs, property costs, research expenditures, etc
- More fun — no parking fees, no crummy dormitory, no transportation
- Focus on the education process, rather than administering people
- Ability to perfect individual lessons, rather than degree programs
- Learn from the very best sources
- Learn what you want to learn, not what people tell you to learn
- Allows people to specialize or become renaissance men and women (jack of trades)
- Numerous profit models apply — advertising, premium accounts, high quality content, school supply resale, brand merchandise
- A large portion of the work is already done — colleges have already created degree programs
- Develop, document, and teach new, emerging fields of research from the top down — starting with education
- Only attracts teachers that are passionate about teaching
- The only barrier to entry is language — accessible to the poor, impoverished, isolated, oppressed, etc.
Disadvantages:
- Little to no real-world interaction
- No real-world deliverables (traditional art projects, robots, or other course work)
Phases:
- Volunteer
- Sponsored
- Self-sufficient
Marketing and advertising:
- Slogan for people turned off by college experience: “No prerequisites, registration, or fees. Only intelligent people.”
- Slogan for people left behind: “You haven’t been left behind, it just took us a while to figure things out. The best education. Online. Free.”
- Slogan for intellectuals: “Continuing education is now free, online, and will continue to improve towards perfection.”
- Ads on instructables.com, makezine.com, deviantart.com, ted.com, public transportation systems, and around campuses, primary schools, and community centers.
- Encourage people to find their “place”
- Create graphical themes for the different schools of knowledge
Revenue sources:
- Premium content
- Higher-quality content
- Ads
- Self publication
- School supply resale
- Gear — t-shirts, DVD’s, etc.
Other ideas:
- The Gradient of Education — people can explicitly and implicitly express their level of enlightenment in the following stages: Core (essentials), Exploration (finding what they’re truly interested in), Realization (becoming the best they can at what they’re interested in)
