A CyberOne student, preparing for an interview with a campus newspaper, asked us several questions today including, “Is Cyberone the future of education at the University level?” I ended up writing a much longer-winded response than I’d expected. Here it is:
There are a lot of different ways in which you can answer this question:
- Are classes being offered at top universities going to be increasingly open to the public? I think a lot depends on how universities come to see their mission — one of public enlightenment or one of serving a select few. This is a question that relates both to mission as well as to business models. As with the rest of this course, the trick will be to figure out how to sustain an enterprise based on openness.
- Is the model of CyberOne scalable? I was thinking about this last night. We have drawn a group of highly-motivated students who I have high hopes have the ability to organize and teach themselves. Will that be true on a broader level?
- Are classes going to be taught through 3-D Multi-User Virtual Environments? One day that question might seem as quaint as asking whether everyone will be using a web browser. I think the more important question is what the compelling value of a MUVE is for education and whether most schools have the capacity to realize that value. It could be the case that MUVEs substitute for F2F classrooms. But I find that unlikely unless/until most of society has moved into a MUVE in a Matrix-like way. I think in the short run the most compelling use of MUVEs will be to simulate phenomena that wouldn’t be possible to model in real life.
- Are classes going to be more decentralized and allow students to chart their own course, even come up with their own “theory of the class”? In the best spirit of the liberal arts tradition, as well as what we know about adult education, I hope so. If wikis have taught us that there’s a lot of knowledge out in the peripheries waiting for the right architecture to be unlocked, then the same applies to education. In the professional ed courses I teach, we follow the mantra that the students have as much to teach each other as we do. However, the paradox is that it takes more work for teachers to take themselves out of the class than it does for them to just dictate all of its terms. (Democracy is more expensive than dictatorship!)
