A distance education revolution

By Lucian J Hudson. In Danny Boyle’s Olympic Games opening ceremony, the portrayal of the Industrial Revolution was extraordinary for its energy and drama. Underpinning it was the power of technological change.
Oceans of Innovation, a recent essay published by the UK's Institute for Public Policy Research, argues that in the late 1700s and early 1800s there were a number of prevailing conditions that allowed so many innovations to take off. Among these was the democratisation of education and the realisation that ‘ideas’ were no longer simply the business of the wealthy elite. The process of spreading education used to be extremely slow, requiring whole-system change. Just as it was in the Industrial Revolution, the ability to spread information is only part of the story.
As Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler suggest in their recent book Abundance, tomorrow’s education system is “decentralised, personalised and extremely interactive”. For distance learning to be really effective, active engagement is essential.
MIT, Harvard, Coursera and others promise to deliver high quality higher education content to massive global audiences via massive open online courses – MOOCs – and, in some respects, these are the higher education broadcast platform for the internet age.