Project Athena: Education for Everyone
July 10th, 2008
This is an Idea Foundry post. For more information on what this is all about, take a look over here.
Background
We all know Wikipedia. Fewer of us know about WikiBooks, the offshoot that is attempting to use the community to source free and open (and current) academic textbooks. If anything, the Wikimedia foundation has been the flagship of what can be accomplished with community sourced content. The catch is that they remain reference sites. WikiBooks comes the closest, yet even that content isn’t present in a truly pedagogical way (few of the books have exercises), and from the completion rate it seems that convincing a community to complete a goal the scope of a full textbook is a bit of a challenge.
In contrast, most standards and initiatives in the eLearning industry are build with a vision of modularity, flexibility and sequencability. The SCORM standard (no matter how much of a pain it is to implement) is an incredibly flexible method of delivering electronic educational material, including dependencies, pre-requisites, adjudication, validation, and even metric and content quality analysis. Yet all the business models that have been developed to serve the eLearning market are based on keeping the content proprietary and locked behind the doors of corporate interest, so that the only ones who may benefit are those that can afford it. Even forward looking efforts like MIT’s project to put all of their lectures online are not deemed profitable. Whether for continuing education, homeschooling, professional training, certification or any of the many other applications, the true power of an openly available educational repository has been hamstrung by the misconception that content is this market’s competitive advantage.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
The Concept
We know that there are many people who have something to teach (and are willing to teach it), and many more that are interested in learning. In Marketing we call these people contributors and consumers (or appropriate buzzword of the day). The sources have been identified; their motivations are known… so why not really push the education aspect and use the wiki metaphor to build eLearning? The tools already exist, and I’ve build proofs-of-concept of several of the technology bridges required to make this happen. Mediawiki as the CMS, a service layer for distribution based on most of the common protocols. The only large piece ( and likely the reason this hasn’t been built yet ) is the learning management system. These systems are traditionally a huge pain to implement, and no good open source options exist yet. Their size and complexity requires a full software development team, project managers, business analysts and most of all funding.
Business Model
While my vision of this project has always been in the non-profit sector, I propose that you can not only source eLearning content from an open community, but can also make it available to anyone, world wide, free of charge, and still be profitable, simply by taking a page from MIT’s book: Make the content freely available, but charge for the degree. In this projects’ case, users would be able to consume, review, edit and test themselves against every single line of text and every course in the database, yet if a student wants a validated transcript there’ll be a small processing fee: $1, maybe $5, no more than that. There would be a similar deal for corporations- if you want to use our e-learning you can either have the SCORM package for your own LMS, or set up a validation gateway with our system so students can easily take their training certifications from job to job.
Delivery channels can vary- you could complete a short module on a mobile device, download one to a Kindle, take it on your home PC or laptop, or even download it to a remote machine, kiosk or testing center. The key here is to make distribution as easy as possible, to build eLearning into a Rich Networked Application that is available via every reasonable channel of media consumption.
The best part of this project is that the company would be building a treasure trove of community approved and vetted educational content. This could be freely distributed to OLPC, schools the world over, universities, etc etc etc. Can education be free and easily accessible? It should be, and I don’t see why it can’t.
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