Free and Open
3 min read
Over at Big Think, Kirsten Winkler has a piece on Khan Academy and Wikipedia that she put out yesterday. In her piece, she sees a similarity between Khan Academy and Wikipedia:
So both, Khan and Wales, are proving that there is “a better way†to deliver true free education on the Internet. And I think this is the really radical part. If you take a look at what the Khan Academy is going to offer for free to educators one could ask why anyone would pay for similar products?
The fact that both Wikipedia and Khan Academy can be accessed without charge is great, but only considering the cost leaves out the real value: both of these resources can be reused, remixed, and redistributed because they are licensed under Creative Commons licenses that support reuse: Khan Academy uses the Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike variant, where Wikipedia uses the Attribution ShareAlike (It's also worth noting that Wikipedia is built on Mediawiki, an open source platform; I'd love to see the codebase of Khan Academy released for reuse under an Open Source license).
This is where the value comes in, and this is why these resources are important for education: licensing that supports reuse and recontextualization supports analysis, synthesis, and change. In short, the content can evolve with the learner, with the lesson, or with the pedagogical need.
Looking at the learning process as a thing that "needs" a business and a business model to support it misses the point entirely, and it's why people from a business background often don't understand education (in business speak, this generally translates as "the educational market is difficult to crack"). Education is a process; it unfolds over time, over iterations, and when it's working best it's never done. Education is different than certification. But businesses break things down to a transaction, a point of sale - that's not a bad thing, at all, until people conflate the business need of a company trying to profit off education with the needs of the learners that educational products need to serve.
This cultural difference - the focus on a limited time horizon, looking for a big exit; versus education that plays out over years - is frequently overlooked. And this cultural difference leads to people remaining focused on "free" as opposed to "reusable and sustainable." Free doesn't offer much as a business model, but reusable and sustainable offer worlds of opportunity.
Image Credit: "Wide open spaces & Dimensions" taken by regev tovim, published under an Attribution-No Derivatives license.
