'The World is Open': Is Academe?

"Open means that there are opportunities to learn," says Curtis J. Bonk, author of The World is Open:  How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education (Jossey-Bass) in an interview with Scott Jaschik in today's Inside Higher Education. Bonk isn't by any means arguing that the "digital divide" is now closed.  Access is only as open as the society that embraces it.  Still he is looking at the many different ways that higher education is making use of open access as a pedagogical model that can not only transform what we teach but our relationship, through that teaching, to the larger world--and vice versa. 

Bonk mentions such important 2009 educational self-learning and self-teaching enterprises as Peer-to-Peer University http://p2pu.org/ .   He also highlights the MIT OpenCourseWare project, the earlies open educational model.  Tufts, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Utah State and dozens if not hundreds of institutions of higher learning are taking the lead in placing course materials on line, storing enormous amounts of educational content on the web and making it ever-easier (as Jimmy Wales likes to say) to make all the world's knowledge available to anyone in the world for free.

Is it really free?  Of course not.  There are always costs at every stage and phase of the process.  At the same time, relative to tuition at a private or even, now, a state university, the cost of admission to open universities is very low and the barriers even lower. 

What about quality?  As with Wikipedia, the most common complaint against open access learning is there is no quality control.  Bonk names the "deadly dozen" of problems with the open education movement among them "Internet access, quality, plagiarism, copyright, access for the disabled, adequate training of students as well as instructors, English dominance of Web content."  Bonk takes these seriously, says all need to be addressed, and notes that these were the same kinds of issues that arose for courses taught in previous generations by correspondence, radio, or tv.   Bonk turns the question around asking "what erosion of standards?  For whom are they eroding and by what measures?"   Evaluate the evaluation, in other words, in order to think about what is truly at stack.  And think about what one is trying to accomplish with traditional higher education versus the goals of open access education.    The standards might not be the same--and the goals might not be either.  

These are just some of the highlights of this intriguing interview.  To read the entire interview, visit http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/25/bonk