Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020, Y. professor says

At its core, the open education movement and the larger open content, copyleft movement has "a fundamental belief that knowledge is a public good and should be fully shared," explains Catherine Casserly, senior partner with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Wiley, she says, is viewed in the open education realm as an imaginative innovator who is always thinking of new applications for disseminating knowledge to the many instead of keeping it "locked up" for the benefit of the few.

In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, though, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer.

But Wiley sees a future where textbooks could always be downloaded for free, easily edited to meet the needs of the teacher and students. The average college textbook today costs between $100 and $150, he notes, so there's a kind of "arms race" constantly going on in which students figure out how to share textbooks or buy used ones, and publishers try to make the books obsolete every 18 months.

Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30. He also is the founder of the Utah Open High School, which debuts next fall. It, too, will use open content materials, and will provide an online education for 125 students.

When he taught at Utah State University, Wiley became famous in higher-ed circles for letting anyone sign up for his class. Unlike typical online classes, this one required no tuition and no password, and Wiley interacted with all his students, even the ones in Italy. A similar class this semester at BYU has attracted non-paying students from Brazil to Indonesia. In this class, students do their homework on blogs that anyone in the world can read (and in fact some of the blogs were picked up by an international educational newsletter.) When education is digital and open, the circle keeps getting wider.

Utah is, in some ways, on the cutting edge of educational reform. It's the only state in the country, for example, that has a statewide initiative to fund open courseware. On the other hand, the 2009 Legislature did not renew funding for the project.

As at most higher education institutions across America, educational innovation in Utah is hit and miss. At many Utah universities, Wiley says, there are professors who record their lectures and download them onto iTunes, and there are professors who have been delivering the exact same lecture for the past 20 years.

Every college and university needs to adapt, he says, or they won't survive. But BYU, he notes, might be a special case. Students will likely still flock there for the two extra benefits the school offers: a religious education and the chance to meet and marry an LDS Church member.

E-MAIL: jarvik@desnews.com