The Peak

SFU should open courses, minds

By Erika Zell

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology piloted a web site with a unique goal: to make university-level courseware available for common use on the world wide web. The really unusual part? They wanted to do it for free.

Since its initiation, MIT’s courseware sharing site and its offspring, ocwconsortium.org, has expanded to include materials for over 1,900 courses from more than 250 universities around the world. In less than an hour, I’d skimmed resources from classes in nuclear physics, architecture, and atmospheric science — all from my desk here at rainy old SFU.

There are currently only three Canadian schools working as partners with the consortium, and unfortunately, SFU is not one of them. The first Canadian addition was Capilano University, which joined in 2006. In an interview with the Georgia Straight this month, John Wilson, a business instructor at Capilano, discussed the concept, and asked the glaring question: Why are Canadian universities so resistant to the idea of universal learning?

“Knowledge,” says Wilson, “when locked up inside your head or locked up behind intellectual barriers, doesn’t benefit society at large.” I agree with him whole-heartedly when he compares information to love, whereby both only realize their potential value when you give them away. Holding knowledge trapped behind the formidable walls of academia is at best frustrating, at worst elitist, and either way, useless.

Maybe it’s just the idealist in me, but I can’t imagine refusing someone the right (and yes, I just use the word ‘right’) to learn. Post-secondary education is largely about competition these days, but when its benefits are universally acknowledged, we have to ask ourselves: why? Sadly, the value of our schooling lies just as much in the piece of paper we receive at the end as it does in the knowledge we gain in the classroom, and for better or for worse, it’s what you can put on your resumé after graduation that counts.

You can’t put classes you study through the consortium on your CV, and you don’t get credit towards your degree, but what you do get is a broader knowledge base to apply to the studies you are paying for, and I can’t see why this would ever be considered a bad thing. Because there is no degree or certificate at the end of using opencourseware.org, this program is not a threat to traditional post-secondary institutions — employers will still place value in conventional education, but there is still unquestionable worth in allowing the general population the chance to know more, learn more, and grow more.

So, Canada, let’s show the world what we’ve got. We have three universities donating their materials? Education small-fries such as Columbia and Mexico have higher participation rates. We need to recognize that information should not be viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold, where capital increases lead to diminishing returns, but a public good that when shared freely, everyone benefits from.

It’s just economics, and maybe if more schools communicated their courseware online, more people would have this understanding.