After my recent talk at the Berkman Center, Will Free Benefit the Rich, a reporter from the Boston Phoenix asked me to chat with her about MITx. Her position was pretty clear-- the response to MITx seemed "rhapsodic" and she wanted to use my research as a lens to raise questions about whether MITx was going to "revolutionize" education. I was happy to do that, and I thought the article was generally representative of what I said: that MITx is pretty awesome, as is OER generally, but I think it disproportionately benefits already-advantaged learners.
There was, however, one sentence that I wanted to retract:
In the article, I'm quoted as saying this:
"There's clear evidence that those who consume open courseware are predominantly affluent people,"
That didn't sound like something I would say--or at least it sounded wrong to me, so I asked the reporter to send me the tape, and she very kindly did. Here's the full quote:
“What countries do people come from? What backgrounds do people come from? Who’s using these opportunities? I mean, are these people with college educations looking to further their careers? Are their people taking the classes on their mobile phones in rural Tanzania? Are there—once you figure out who it is, there’s a whole second set of questions about, okay, does MIT as an institution have any obligations other than getting it out there? I think there’s—we have—clear evidence that those who consume open courseware are predominantly affluent people.”
So in context, the statement makes a little more sense. I'm not comparing people driving BMWs to people driving K-cars, I'm comparing people in higher education with rural peasants.
Even still, my statement is wrong. We do not have clear evidence about who uses open courseware. We actually know much too little about the adoption of educational resources on the Web. I should have been more circumspect in my language, and it's a lesson I'll remember in future interviews.
A better sentence would have been "There is strongly suggestive evidence that Open Courseware resources are more likely to be used by affluent people, but we need to know more about who uses OCW and how." I think there is a long line of research on educational technology that shows that it disproportionately benefits the already-advantages, and Mark Warschauer's lit review is a great place to start. For more specific evidence from OCW, one of the most thorough reports is the 2005 review of OCW by MIT (they have released subsequent reports, but with much less detail). Reading through it, the OCW team highlights how people in technical positions in industry and in universities around the world benefit from OCW--and most of the stories discuss people in elite institutions. The larger data tell a similar story, for instance, here's a breakdown of visits to MIT by educational institutions:
I haven't done a full analysis of the listing, but the dominance of elite institutions in the left column is pretty striking. We don't see the long tail, maybe there are hundreds of community colleges with a few hundred views each, but the schools most using OCW are other elite schools.
One important piece of context here is to remember that much of MIT's OCW is highly specialized technical training. Putting a course on Aeronautics online is unlikely to help rural Tanzanian peasants, and it's not supposed to (FYI, I think a lot about rural Tanzanian peasants because I've spent a few summers in rural Tanzania, and have friends there who I care deeply about). It's taking some of the best Aeronautics instruction in the world, and making it accessible outside of Cambridge, MA. If Aeronautics instruction is useful to you, you are probably doing pretty well in life wherever you are in the world.
So where does this leave us; how rhapsodic should we be? For my own part, I think MITx is a fabulous idea, and a great experiment for an outstanding institution. I'm proud to be joining the MIT faculty as a visiting lecturer this fall, and I'm thrilled that MIT is thinking about how they can share their expertise with the world.
But at the same time, I think anyone involved in OER should think carefully about exactly who benefits from free stuff on the Web. Susan Hockfield, in her press release, said:
"And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”
It's possible that MITx will break barriers to education, and I'm certain that it could be designed to do so. I also think there is a good bit of historical precedent to suggest that it is very likely to predominantly benefit people who have already broke past (or were born past) most of those barriers.