This Month’s Cato Unbound: The Online Education Revolution
As Joseph Schumpeter famously wrote, markets are agents of “creative destruction”: when market forces are free to operate, and when entrepreneurs are free to act on their ideas, the old must often give way to the new.
Innovation and cultural dynamism are the hallmarks of a free economy. This state of constant flux is to our way of thinking a welcome and valued thing. Only an economy that is constantly in transition can hope to approximate the changing needs and wants of a robust and flourishing society.
Our love of dynamism is one reason why libertarians aren’t really conservatives, and why we might even wish that we could claim the label “progressive” for ourselves — if it hadn’t been taken, long ago, by individuals whose beliefs differ sharply from our own.
At Cato Unbound this month we are discussing what may prove to be a remarkable example of creative destruction. Within the last few years, Massive Online Open Courses — MOOCs, for short — have become one of the most important trends in higher education. As our lead essayist Alex Tabarrok argues, traditional higher education hasn’t changed substantially for centuries. Yet there is no good reason why this should be, not with all of the new information technology that the market has put at our disposal.
Together with his colleague Tyler Cowen, Tabarrok has founded Marginal Revolution University, which is planned as a growing series of free, online courses that anyone can take. The lectures are brief, watchable on your own schedule, viewable on mobile devices, and replayable. You can ask questions of the professors and receive detailed, personalized feedback. You can study in a group or entirely on your own, and students are invited to create supplemental videos that might be included in future class sessions.
MR University, as it’s called for short, hopes to deliver flexible, inexpensive higher education to the masses, in a way that Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard — for all their tradition — never could. And it’s just one small player in a burgeoning new educational sector. So how should educators and policymakers think about these developments?
To answer that question, we have recruited a panel of distinguished commentators: Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor in Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia; Alan Ryan is the former Warden of New College, Oxford, and a frequent commentator on developments in liberal education; and Kevin Carey is director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation.
As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or on other venues. We also welcome your letters. Send them to jkuznicki at cato dot org. Selections may be published at the editors’ option.
