iterating toward openness

Here’s something you probably never thought you’d see: a list of 100 colleges and universities where you can earn your degree without paying any tuition. Most of the programs on the list look legitimate. And yes, they all have some qualification criteria you must meet to get the free goods.

If open educational resources, open learning support, and open accreditation are just too hard, why not simply participate in one of these programs? After all, isn’t our ultimate goal to provide access to educational opportunity to those who go without?

Yes, but our goal is more than simply being free or inexpensive. For example, we need to remove entrance requirements, we need to provide rights to make local adaptations to the curriculum, etc. In short, we need to be able to scale open education to everyone. Even if there were no entrance requirements at all, 100 tuition-free universities will bless some people’s lives but will not address the larger problem. And the answer isn’t to build more free universities.

To borrow and adapt a analogy (originally a critique of AI) from Dreyfus, building universities to educate mankind is like trying to climb trees to get to the moon. Once you reach the top of a certain tree, you say to yourself, ‘this approach isn’t going to get me there… I need a radical new approach!’ So you climb down, find a different tree that looks taller, and begin climbing it. The trouble is, of course, no matter how many trees you find and climb, while each of them will get you slightly closer to the moon, none can actually get you there. You need to give up tree climbing and start developing space flight.

Another analogy I really love comes from Richard G. Scott. Speaking of the favorite Utah irrigation analogy of “getting the water all the way to the end of the row,” Elder Scott suggested that we should instead focus on getting it to rain.

What these analogies tell us about universal access to education is that we cannot simply scout out taller trees or increase the water pressure in our canals - we need to find completely different ways to approach the problem and abandon bankrupt techniques. And Elder Scott’s analogy reminds us that we should not hesitate to call on God for help - after all, these are His children whose lives we’re trying to bless.