Learning and open source

"Dammit Fry, I can't teach - I'm a professor!" - Professor Farnsworth, Futurama

Education is an industry - or rather, education is a byproduct and imitation of industry. Educational institutions serve as culling mechanisms in a system with competition, much as money serves as proxy for power in a system with scarcity. But what of learning?

Learning is, at best, moderately correlated with education. By coercing students to repeatedly immerse in material, the hope is some genuine absorption and perhaps even understanding occurs. But the primary concern, for both students and school, is in grading and ranking - supposedly measurable results that then allow jobs to better choose amongst their applicants.

Before I continue, I want to caveat my cynicism - schools are full of good people, many of whom are genuinely trying to learn and improve society. My concerns lie chiefly with the force of extrinsic motivation (e.g. grades, career) on those without power (students, most teachers) and with the priorities of those with power. Schools are in fact still in a better state than many other institutions - but my expectations for schools are higher, as I believe education to be the key to a successful society.

My main goal here is not to criticize what we do have - it is to describe what we should. Grades, tests, interviews, jobs - these are well established as necessary evils, and I'll admit I can't come up with cures for them. However, I do believe that true learning can be a more significant component of education, even with these other ills. The main key? Openness.

I have taken courses in a variety of environments, ranging from quite prestigious to quite not. I have used books and other educational resources ranging from quite proprietary to very open. And I have found in every case that openness and accountability leads to better teaching and true learning, if the students choose it.

That last point is key - students must choose. Education is a treadmill, but learning cannot be forced. My philosophy on this is relatively simple - if they choose not to learn, then that is truly their loss. Attempting to force the uninterested will simply hurt the interested.

A small portion of textbooks and educational material is available openly, "free as in speech" - and besides being at a price any student can afford, this material tends to receive more feedback and thus be higher quality. Super expensive and restrictive material, either distributed in insultingly priced textbooks of DRM'd PDFs, tends to have less transparency and is actually lower quality. The overuse of phrases like "clearly", "obvious", and "trivial" by lazy writers with other priorities (read: research) leads to dense tomes that are only useful to those who have already spent years with the subject. If something is clear or trivial, then it shouldn't take much time to show it.

Actual lectures are similar - turn on a video camera, and teachers teach better. Several institutions have put high quality lectures on YouTube, and if you watch them you'll find that the teachers are, well, teaching. Of course they were likely selected because of this, but even an inferior teacher will spend some effort to improve if they know their lectures will be shared broadly and in perpetuity.

Ultimately the situation is much like it is with software (hence the relevance here) - openness leads to quality. I have seen closed code and closed courses, and both often have only the absolute minimal effort required in them. If the author/teacher has any other priorities (hobbies, research, anything), why should they bother putting anything beyond the absolute minimum into their work?

Open source code and open education materials have accountability, which forces their creator to make them higher quality or face embarrassment. In the worst case where they still don't put much effort, at least somebody else can come along and expand/fork the effort. You can't beat the price, and the availability (and typically high quality solution keys) is better for autodidacts as well.

I'll close with two specific suggestions that I think are compatible with the competitive nature of education but will still improve learning. Firstly, all educational material should be licensed in a free/open nature. Secondly, all classrooms should have cameras in the back and have some chance (say 5%) of being recorded and shared.

I would wager that any educational institution willing to enact those simple steps would find the quality of their lectures and educational resources vastly improved. Of course, those steps run counter to the incentives of some powerful publishers and administrators, hence they are unlikely to happen any time soon. But they are compatible with the necessary evils of grades, competition, and industry, and would at least allow those who want to learn and not just advance their career to be better able to do so.