We are not there yet, but the billions that geography used to cost the education sector will be restreamed in part to make delivery of learning materials to all students everywhere free.
There is an enlightening, if a bit comical, opinion piece on the subject of free in today’s Wall Street Journal. It is written by a newspaper executive about the new book Free by Chris Anderson, who the article author says, “strains to sound provocative, at times, but flirts instead with absurdity. . . .” The author Jeremy Philips is an ExVP of Dow Jones, where “free” disquiets.
The newspaper industry is collapsing because geography is gone: readers online do not need their printed product sold on the street or delivered to their homes. The newspapers do not have alternate sources of revenue to replace their news stand sales and subscriptions.
Education, however, will be in better shape financially when free finally dismantles the ivy walls. Buried in the WSJ article is the reason why this is true: “the potent network effect that derives from scale.”
When students use free online textbooks and other digital learning resources that are free, billions of dollars are no longer needed for printing and delivering the textbooks and other resources. The potent network effect of every fifth grader using the same free online math textbook is that savings are derived from scale. If the printed textbook cost from creation to putting it into the hands of a student is $20 and 1 million fifth graders get a copy, that equals $20,000,000 freed up for something like increasing teacher salaries.
For companies that own newspapers, the revenue does not come in when geography makes their product free. For education, the disappearance of geography caused by the free online network makes learning not only free, but frees up money for the non-networkable human-to-human aspects that are crucial to individual learning.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Many textbook publishers are already creating online versions of their textbook, which is fine, but that is not the best use of tools that allow for interactive learning. The best use of the web for learning is for students to create their own content and share it with each other.