Is Globally Democratized Learning Always a Good Thing?

It will come as no surprise to readers of WorldWise that the flourishing of global higher education has led to worldwide conference proliferation. I haven’t, alas, been able to accept assorted invitations to recent and upcoming schmooze-fests in Poland, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, London, Paris, and Shanghai. But I did make it to a thought-provoking gathering in Washington, D.C., last week at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The panel of Asian and U.S. education leaders addressed many good questions, but one in particular lingers in my mind: In a high-tech era of radically democratized global learning, what will become of the traditional hierarchical relationship between professor and student?

This is a pressing question for universities in the United States, of course – it animates Anya Kamenetz’s recent book DIY-U, a manifesto that calls for blowing up conventional universities and empowering students as never before. But it also has special currency in the global context. That is because of the advent, to cite just a couple of examples, of open-source online course offerings from the likes of MIT and Yale, not to mention their counterparts in the fast-growing international for-profit university sector. These new programs and institutions are by design intended to cross borders and to unbundle the mixture of professors, curriculum, and students, all gathered in one place, that for hundreds of years has defined our notion of what a university is.

At the Wilson Center discussion, former University of Michigan president James Duderstadt ticked off a long list of transformative technologies and modes of learning that seem destined to reshape postsecondary instruction globally. We are entering, he said, “a second revolution in information technology that will dwarf in sheer transformational scope and power anything we have yet experienced in the current information age.” Along with open courseware initiatives, ranging from iTunes University to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, he cited Google’s Library Project; Wikipedia; Facebook and Twitter; virtual environments such as Second life; immersive games like World of Warcraft; and much more. The upshot, he declared, will be a “a new form of collective human intelligence, as billions of world citizens interact together, unconstrained by today’s monopolies of knowledge or learning opportunities.” All this, according to Duderstadt, is “really scaring universities.”

Far be it from me to stand in the way of worldwide educational empowerment. Who wants to be against progress? And yet I find myself conflicted about some aspects of this educational revolution. First, some caveats. Yes, I am in favor of lowering borders to learning, whether through the physical movement of students and professors or by providing high-quality curriculum and long-distance instruction to students who might otherwise be cut off from postsecondary opportunities. I’m also beginning to see how interactive classrooms can engage students in new ways. “Twitter makes a classroom a community,” maintained a Penn State professor at another conference presentation I heard a few months back. He lets students tweet their running commentary on his classes and posts their remarks on a lecture-hall screen for all to see. (Taken with his observation, I tweeted it to my own handful of followers – and saw the power of viral media a few minutes later when Times Higher Education retweeted my bulletin to its legion of faithful.)

That said, it seems to me that students don’t always learn effectively on their own or with minimal assistance. Peer learning has its place, but the wisdom of crowds isn’t always, well, wise. I’m attached to the notion that professors provide a guiding intelligence to students, that there is nothing wrong with plain old knowledge transmission from the well-informed to the ignorant. At its most radical, the movement for self-directed learning, both nationally and globally, risks undermining the importance of factual knowledge and standards of evidence – not to mention standards of excellence – in the name of technology-assisted communal knowledge-seeking. This does not always work. Just try your luck researching any remotely subtle question at www.answers.com.

When I asked Duderstadt about my concerns, his answer was thoughtful. He distinguished between universities that are in the business of knowledge creation and those that aim largely to transmit existing learning. In the first set of institutions, he contended, the medieval tradition of a union of masters and scholars ‘is still at the core.” Elsewhere, however, the most productive way to teach students basic subjects may be to get professors out of the classroom in favor of interactive software. And at universities like MIT, he said, “students learn more from one another than from the faculty.” In that kind of environment, communities of students could largely rely on one another and draw on professors primarily as consultants.

Maybe so. Any depiction of this new educational world certainly calls for many, many shades of gray. I love the empowering aspects of global learning. And as many have observed, the things Wikipedia gets wrong are far less striking than how much it gets right. For some students, using technology to teach well-established subjects, as in the models pioneered by MIT and Carnegie Mellon (and Yale, Kaplan, Laureate, etc.) may be just fine. I am far less wary of that approach than I am of telling students that scouring the web for expertise, picking their own curriculum, and learning from one another is just as good as studying under the tutelage of sage instructors. After all, the best professors everywhere instill precisely those habits of mind that will give their students, wherever they live and learn, the experience and wisdom to intelligently navigate the new world of knowledge.