XplanaZine

Stephen Downes pointed out some inconsistencies in my article from last Friday in which I outlined the gap between where we are and what I think it will take to have a free curriculum. My original article was a response to comments by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

In particular, Downes takes me to task for assertions and assumptions such as 1) a free curriculum must make money, 2) that the existing curriculum infrastructure must somehow be converted, or 3) that instructors must write the curriculum. These comments make me realize that I was not as clear in my post as I was in my thoughts, so let me reorganize a bit and address these observations.

First, my contention wasn’t that a free curriculum must make money but, rather, that there must be ways for those who are so inclined to make money. I contend this because price or lack thereof is not the only thing that will make the concept of a free curriculum viable. In addition to having an excellent curriculum that costs nothing, there must also be community support so that the curriculum will be adopted. Currently, there are many people in the adopting educational community that profit from the existing proprietary publishing system — administrators, authors, members of adopting committees, lab directors, campus bookstores, etc. While all of these people may support a free curriculum in theory, it’s hard for me to believe that they will volunteer to give up their pork barrels. I’d love to believe that we would all collaborate and create a free curriculum that would be readily adopted by many institutions, but I’m a cynic at heart. I believe it will be easier to make converts if we provide a way for those with current vested interests to make a little money along the way.

With regards to converting the existing curriculum infrastructure, my point was specifically about the transition from traditional models to online instruction and instructional content. I was making the assumption, for the sake of my article, that the future curriculum will be primarily digital and distributed. My personal opinion is that this kind of curriculum (digital and distributed) is best created from scratch as traditional, in-class models do not necessarily translate literally or well to an online counterpart. At the same time, if recent history is any indication, it seems most likely that the free curriculum movement (that I foresee as primarily digital) will begin with simple conversions of traditional curriculum and evolve to a more native digital identity over time. Doing it this way will seem quicker to most than starting from scratch and redesigning the entire curriculum. And, if the original free curriculum is based on conversions of the traditional curriculum, my admonition is simply that we pay lots of attention to the filters used in that conversion process.

Finally, while in my original article I did write extensively about the role of instructors, I in no way meant to imply that they are the only ones who can undertake this task. On the contrary, I believe the future free curriculum should be penned by all participants in the community — students, parents, instructors, and administrators alike. The primary shortcoming regarding traditional instructors participating in collaborative or open source curriculum building is that they — particularly those in higher education — do not share naturally. They tend to be overly concerned with intellectual property and unconvinced that their students are qualified to make meaningful contributions to their teaching or their ongoing professional development. This means that instructors, by nature, tend to become islands, cut off from collaborative thinking. On the other hand, these same instructors are wonderful subject matter experts and should be part of any open source, collaborative curriculum. While the movement may not be spearheaded by them or entirely dependent on them, I do believe they have critical knowledge to share.

Downes said that my original argument “is a bit like being skeptical about Wikipedia because Britannica has hired all the encyclopedia authors,” but that was not my meaning at all. I am not skeptical about the possibility of a free curriculum because all the authors already work for publishers, but rather because I know how hard it is to foster widespread, voluntary collaboration on projects among faculty and administrators. And, while they are not the only ones who can create or adopt the free curriculum, they will play in its development and acceptance.

As I state in my title, I wish the curriculum were free. My personal feeling is that it can be. When it is, I foresee its primary identity is digital, distributed, and highly individualized. It will consist of large collections of learning materials that are mapped to known user needs (from learning objectives to standards) and formatted in packages that can be distributed to multiple learning frameworks. It will be created, revised and recreated by instructors, students, parents, and administrators. It will represent the true learning goals of the community and will evolve efficiently over time.

I think Wikipedia and Wikibooks are a good start with regards to process. I think MIT’s OCW is a guide for helping us think about how curriculum and its content can work. I think MERLOT and CAREO are great examples of early repositories that are necessary to make a free curriculum possible. But I do not believe we have yet either the technology or the community framework necessary to begin this work in earnest. We are close, but there are dots yet to be connected.