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Higher education institutions exist as a result of the need to aggregate resources that are scarce (professors, books, journals, laboratories). When I entered university in 1972, I had to leave my home in rural Newfoundland, Canada to go to the city 300km away because of this physical aggregation. While new opportunities exist today that did not exist then, they have mostly just changed movement, while leaving most of the fundamental processes intact.
The emergence of widespread technical infrastructure (the Internet), coupled with an abundance of Free Software and Free Educational Resources (”Open Educational Resources”) has reduced some of this scarcity, and made other models of education possible. You can now use Free Software to do almost anything, so much so that it is now nearly four years since I have used an operating system or desktop application that was not Free Software.
New approaches that build on both the products and processes of Digital Freedom are changing the way we produce and share content and other cultural products. Everything I produce, I make available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (including this posting), and there are many who do the same. The MIT Open Courseware initiative, and the movement that it has spawned is but one of many systems producing the content equivalent of Free Software (although some of the licenses used are anything but Free – particularly when it comes to disallowing the receipt of benefit from commercial contributers and benefit from contributers who may wish to allow that benefit themselves). Instead of asking textbook publishers to aggregate our scarce content, we are making it available under different models of production that do not require the aggregation of scarcity but instead distribute abundance. Content useful for learning is thus becoming more and more abundant, and available.
Of course, it is not all good. There is a deeply disturbing and absurd movement to try to accredit the so-called “open educational resources,” with UNESCO seeming to wish to do this for reasons that are of dubious benefit. Any attempt to accredit content will only serve to slow down the rate of production, and is as sensible as accrediting books on library shelves. Instead, what should be accredited is an institution’s alignment to a framework of Freedom and Openness.
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