Anya Kamenetz, the author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, is quoted at length in a recent article in the Providence Phoenix.

“The New Homeschool” draws heavily from Anya’s book in explaining how traditional higher education’s days are numbered.

This might not be what you want to read as you’re settling into the new semester and shelling out hundreds of dollars for textbooks, but we’re going to tell you anyway: The traditional model of higher education — the brick-and-mortar universities where tuition continues to skyrocket without much to show in the way of expansion of access or post-graduation success — is doomed.

An open-education movement, one that emphasizes personalized courses of study, shared resources, and above all, online technologies, is coming to campuses and computers everywhere. It’ll transform the way we think about college and its alternatives. Hopefully, the results will be a smarter society that puts reasonable price on the right types of training. Less student-loan debt, for sure. Fewer four-year degrees, maybe. A more comprehensive view of teaching and learning — definitely.

In her book DIY U (Chelsea Green Publishing), which came out this year, Anya Kamenetz explores how the value of a four-year college degree is changing, and how parents, students, and anyone interested in learning can expect their educational options to expand in the future. She’s frank about what it means for the existing behemoths:

“If you are a large university that’s academically undistinguished . . . you should be worried by this new model because what’s available online is already better in lots of ways than what you have to offer,” she says on the phone from her home in New York City. “These online options should change the way we look at in-person colleges.” (Even to have to make that “in-person” distinction indicates that the shift is already happening.)

While tech innovation plays a big role in these changes, the do-it-yourself education revolution is bigger than the Internet. It’s a philosophical shift toward learner-centered flexibility. In the future, students will have more options — they’ll log into open-source academic classrooms or supplement their classroom and professional experiences with online and real-world resources. This isn’t necessarily about foregoing college. It’s about changing the definition of what college is.

“The promise of free or marginal-cost open-source content, techno-hybridization, unbundling of educational functions, and learner-centered educational experiences and paths is too powerful to ignore,” Kamenetz writes in DIY U. “These changes are inevitable. They are happening now.” She stresses on the phone that these initiatives hold the student as their central focus, which separates them from so-called online “diploma mills,” a factor in the online-learning revolution that Kamenetz doesn’t deeply explore — probably because while they do expand access, their for-profit financial models are quite different from the DIY aesthetic of other endeavors in the book.

Here are just a few pieces of what Kamenetz calls the “edupunk” revolution (they’re not all tech-focused, though most are).

• UNIVERSITY-AFFILIATED OPEN COURSEWARE — syllabi, academic lectures, readings, assignments, and videos from top universities.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) is the granddaddy of these. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning) and Yale University’s Open Yale Courses (oyc.yale.edu) each offer their own versions. Some offer assessments; others don’t. None of them offer accreditation.

Increasingly, they’re more than just repositories for lecture notes. Members of the national OpenCourseWare Consortium, which include those universities and many others, are benefiting from — and creating — software that allows for personalized tutoring, applications you can download onto your iPhone, and new platforms that let virtual peer groups connect around each topic.

Those developments will surely filter down through open-courseware initiatives, which is good for online learners who complain of lack of focus, personalization, and peer interaction.

Of Carnegie Mellon’s OLI, Kamenetz writes: “It’s what might happen in a classroom under ideal circumstances, with a teacher of infinite patience, undivided attention, and inexhaustible resources of examples and hints.”

While many of these initiatives have been funded at least in part by the open-education enthusiasts at the California-based Hewlett Foundation, there’s interest on the federal level as well. Open-education resources were specifically allocated $50 million in President Obama’s 2009 announcement of increased support for community colleges. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has introduced the Open College Textbook Act, which would provide federal funding for efforts to create high-quality open-licensed textbooks for college classes; the bill is unlikely to be addressed until next year.

• INDEPENDENT OPEN-LEARNING INITIATIVES like the Peer 2 Peer University (p2pu.org), “an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses.”
P2PU launched last year; already about 700 students have taken free, six-week classes like “Digital Journalism” and “Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature.” P2PU’s founders and “course organizers” are still experimenting with what works, but the basic goal is to provide some structure for learning that goes on outside institutional walls.

“If you’re just sitting at home and you’d like to learn something there seems to be something missing,” says P2PU co-founder Stian Haklev. P2PU provides some of those things, like peer interaction (through online forums, videoconferencing, and chat rooms), feedback, deadlines, and some type of syllabus or road-map.

So far, the results have been positive both in terms of student feedback and institutional growth.

“As the course went on it was the weekly discussions, which were held in an [Internet relay chat] room, that often felt like the highlight of my week,” says Nadeem Shabir, a university graduate who lives in Britain and who took the “Cyberpunk Lit” class last fall. “My peers on the course all had a passion for the subject material and all contributed to the discussions. It was like a really intense book club where no one was afraid of voicing their opinions — or being controversial.”

This fall, P2PU is partnering with the Mozilla Foundation (yes, the folks behind Firefox) to offer the School of Webcraft — 15 or so free web-development courses that start in September. With these classes, and for further offerings, P2PU will try out different accreditation and assessment models. Perhaps it will be free to take the class, but if you want formal recognition, you’ll have to pay. Perhaps it would be skill-based assessments — “We’d use our reputation to stand behind that,” Haklev says.

“We at P2PU are interested in a community reputation that could also offer a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation systems,” the P2PU Web site reads. That said, there are ways to finagle academic credit, depending on the institution. Most university-based open-courseware programs make clear from the start that no credit is available (you are not getting a Yale education by going through an OYC course, in other words). The fact that many open-courseware students don’t care about getting credit speaks to who this movement comprises, currently — self-motivated learners who already have degrees…Click here for the full article.

Anya Kamenetz is the author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.

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