Education should go opensource
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, recently visited a slum in India and reported that he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.” Wikipedia is an open source project that has fundamentally changed how we access information.
How could we apply this open source idea to our education system? Fred Wilson, a VC in New York, explores this idea in his brilliant article hacking education. Here’s the core idea:
An open source approach to education gives power to the people.
All of the leading education institutions in a country could contribute their curriculum to an open source system. And of course, all institutions could get curriculum from such a system. Ideally, the physical manifestation of the curriculum (dead-tree version) would be individually put together for each student to match their specific learning style (right brain, left brain). You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers. A few educators are outstanding, but have limited reach. Thus, we could increase the number of students that superstar educators can reach and teach every day by making them available online, via web video, to millions of people. They should not be stuck in a lecture hall teaching less than a hundred kids at a time.
Access to knowledge is becoming less and less of an issue. It is instantaneously available and relatively reliable on the web. Consequently, an educated person is no longer the one who has exclusive knowledge, but rather the one who makes the most use of the knowledge everyone has access to. What is not available and cannot be assumed is that kids have the skills to make the knowledge meaningful and useful. As a result schools should shift from “teaching content” to setting up experiences and opportunities for kids to learn and practice skills such as analysis, evaluation, communication of ideas, decision-making, etc. Consequently, education institutions for young children should focus on skills and character and let content be the by-product.
What do you think? How would you fix our broken education system?