Rethinking Education

When free online education models started popping up several years ago, I was amazed. I dabbled in Coursera,[i] Khan Academy,[ii] and the open courses of MIT,[iii] Yale,[iv] and CMU.[v] One of the great things about Khan Academy and these other open courses is that not only are they free, but they are of a superb quality. Salman Khan was able to explain complex concepts far better than some of my college professors—and in a ten-minute video nonetheless. The beauty of Khan Academy is that one does not need to pay college tuition to access these educational videos. If someone has access to internet and Khan's website, that's all he or she needs; there is a single teacher, there are no textbooks, and there are a plethora of topics to choose from. This creates a level playing field; there is no hierarchy of have and have-nots because anyone can learn. It is a direct solution to delivering the basic need for education, regardless of one's socioeconomic standing or where one lives.

When we think of education, we naturally gravitate toward the traditional classroom setting in which many of us were raised. However, our current model is unsustainable. Michael Noer cites that the global spending on education is $3.9 trillion; America alone spends $1.3 trillion each year (this was written in 2012, so it is fair to assume that these figures are even higher now).[vi] Plus, spending more on education is not correlated with a smarter population. The US falls far behind in reading, math, and science when compared to other countries.[vii] Given these statistics, why is it not more obvious that our educational system needs to change? Websites like Khan Academy create ways to cut down on the skyrocketing costs of education; by cutting down the cost, we could create ways to make education better and more attainable to more people in the US and around the world.

Finding new ways to educate should be a huge concern for today’s policy makers and innovators. These free course models could be wildly successful in changing our current education system if they started creating ways to validate and verify students’ work, so that an individual can show his or her educational records to an employer or school, similar to a college transcript. Coursera has begun offering course certificates[viii] to do just that. We need to shift our thinking and framework so that a certificate of achievement from a free open course is comparable to an official transcript. Will these free education systems be sustainable and force the current educational framework to change, or will they never be able to compete with our deep-rooted traditional system?

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[i] Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/

[ii] Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/

[iii] Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

[iv] Open Yale Courses. http://oyc.yale.edu/

[v] Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative. http://oli.cmu.edu/

[vi] Noer, Michael. (2012, November 19). One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/

[vii] Noer, Michael. One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education.

[viii] Earn a Course Certificate. Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/signature/