What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [115]
There could be new models for education. One might be education by subscription: I subscribe to a teacher or institution and expect them to feed me new information, challenges, questions, and answers over years. Many schools give graduates refreshers and updates in skills; at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, we call this offer our 100,000-mile guarantee. Education could be a club more than a class: We join to learn and teach together, sometimes handing the teaching duties to the best student on a given subject. Peer-to-peer education works well online as we can see in language-learning services such as Livemocha, where teachers in one language become students in another and where anyone in its gift economy can critique and help any student. It is a learning network.
In the classroom, real or virtual, Google forces educators to teach differently. Why are we still teaching students to memorize facts when facts are available through search? Memorization is not as vital a discipline as fulfilling curiosity with research and reasoning when students recognize what they don’t know, form questions, seek answers, and learn how to judge them and their sources. Internet and Google literacy should be taught to help students vet facts and judge reliability.
Is there a university, post-Google? Yes, these institutions are too big, rich, and valuable to fade away. But like every other institution in society, they should reshape themselves around new opportunities. Universities need to ask what value they add in educational transactions: qualifying teachers, helping students craft curricula, providing platforms for learning. We need to ask when and why it is necessary to be in the same room with fellow students and instructors. Classroom time is valuable but not always necessary. Many professional MBA programs have found ways to limit time together so that education need not interrupt life. The Berlin School of Creative Leadership (where I serve on the advisory board) has students meet in cities around the world so they can tap local expertise. Universities can become bigger than their campuses, and by bringing together special interests and needs from around the world, they can also become smaller, focusing on niches of knowledge while leaving other topics to other institutions. Schools, too, will do what they do best and link to the rest. That requires them to make their knowledge open and searchable; Google demands it.
How will universities work as a business? To quote former MIT professor and satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer about the famous German rocket engineer who came to NASA: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” If I taught three, three-credit courses a term for two terms to 20 students in each and they paid what they pay to my state-supported university—about $250 per credit—that would bring in $90,000, which is what I am paid (I don’t do it for the money). In a competitive market, would students pay $750 for my class? That depends on the quality of my teaching, the reputation of the university, and the state of the competition. If they pay that amount, it still leaves no money for the university. Funds to support its structure would need to come, as they do now, from public or private subsidies. It doesn’t look like a sustainable model.
Then again, look at University of Pheonix,