David Wiley of OpenContent.org has prepared an excellent presentation on the future of education in a digital age. Titled My Commission Testimony at iterating toward openness, the presentation will be given at the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Here’s a long excerpt, which was hard to select from an all around great post.

Students are inside a classroom (tethered to a place), using textbooks and handouts (printed materials), they must pay tuition and register to attend (the experience is closed), talking during class or working with others outside of class is generally discouraged (each student is isolated though surrounded by peers), each student receives exactly the same instruction as each of her classmates (the information presented is generic), and students are students and do not participate in the teaching process (they are consumers).

Compare the classroom learning experience with the same student’s learning experiences outside the classroom:

From her dorm room / the student center / a coffee shop / the bus a student connects to the Internet using her laptop (she is mobile), uses Google to find a relevant webpage (a digital resource which is open for her to access). While carrying out her search, she chats with one friend on the phone and another using instant messaging to see if they can assist in her search (she is connected to other people), she follows links from one website to another exploring related information (the content is connected to other content), she quickly finds exactly the information she needs, ignoring irrelevant material (she gets what is important to her personally), and she shares her find with her friends by phone and IM (she participates in the teaching process).

A similarly digital, open, mobile, connected, personal, participatory story could be told about a day in the life of an engineer or researcher. As life, business, and science drift further from higher education, how is higher education to continue adding value to the lives of those who pour their hearts, souls, years, and dollars into education? What is higher education’s value proposition? This question is worth considering….Once upon a time, higher education enjoyed monopoly positions with regard to curricular content, research archives, expertise, and credentialing. Each of these monopolies has been broken in the recent past, but higher education has yet to recognize and respond to these changes in the environment.

I think it’s a good overview of the issues, and quite a strong statement to make. I’ve never been a fan of institutional education, but perhaps popular culture will change enough that education will be forced to change accordingly.

(hat tip to George Siemens and his fantastic blog eLearn Space for tipping me off the Wiley’s post. Siemens kicked me down my first Gmail account a year ago, but he probably doesn’t remember that 😉 )

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