To Universities: Give it Away
By: Thomas P Seager
Tags: Gary Vaynerchuk, Online Education, Seth Godin, Education, Digital Marketing

To Universities: Give it Away

Knowledge is meant to be shared.

Universities are in the knowledge business.

They create it with research.

They share it with education, books, and article publishing.

They organize it, curate it, and interpret it in their libraries, datasets, and faculty.

Prior to invention of the printing press, knowledge resided primarily in the minds of the people who knew things. Books were expensive to reproduce, because they had to be copied by hand.

In fact, the very first university lectures were little more than a group of scribes, copying word-for-word. A Reader with a valuable book would stand at a lectern, reading from the text, so that the students could copy it over into their own notebooks in parallel, which was much more efficient than passing the book around so the students could take turns making their own copies.

But after the invention of the printing press (one of the earliest harbingers of the Industrial Revolution), books and manuscripts could be reproduced at scale, for way less money.

Book production costs declined by over 75% after invention of the printing press (reproduced from https://ourworldindata.org/books, with data from Zanden 2009, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution).

The production of knowledge exploded when the cost of documenting, sharing, and archiving it came down.

The model for monetizing that knowledge also changed. Instead of learning under the direct tutelage of a Master, students could purchase books, and learn at a geographic and temporal distance from the author.

Nevertheless, the University lecture remained little changed.

The world of knowledge is undergoing another extraordinary technological change enabled by computing and the internet. The marginal cost of documenting, sharing, archiving, and curating knowledge has come down so far that it is now, for practical purposes, zero.

Students seeking knowledge no longer need a library card. The incredible access to knowledge via the internet allows students to learn via twitter, blogs, YouTube — even those in college report how thankful they are for tutorials like those at Khan Academy.

Universities have been slow to change. Although university online offerings have expanded, the dominant business model remains reading, lecture, writing, and exchange of academic credentials for tuition dollars, while research is still organized around the traditions established for the printing press.

In academic research, “papers” are submitted to journal editors, who send the electronic files to other academics for peer-review. Several rounds of revision take place, until finally an archival (and immutable) version is published as a pdf and typically archived in a academic library, behind a paywall. There is hardly any effort at post-publication review, and corrections and retractions are still printed in separate documents as if the original copy was etched in stone (or offset printed on paper).

In fact, technology now allows post-publication revisions, corrections, reviews, and amendments. It just doesn’t happen.

Meanwhile, bloggers, self-published authors, and independent scholars have made available an surfeit of new knowledge that bypasses the traditional mechanisms of sorting, vetting, and filtering knowledge established by the academic system. The new model is more democratic in one sense, because the barriers to entry are so much lower. It’s also subject to misconceptions, fallacy, misinformation, and political distortion.

As if academics aren’t?