Google launched YouTube EDU, giving access to over 200 full courses from leading universities, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale and IIT/IISc. It can be considered as a response to iTunes University.
Google draws some criticism for this educational project. Dan Colman:
All very nice, but I would not equate a collection of large American universities with “Education”. If Google is serious about ‘Google Education’, it should be posting educational videos, whatever their source, and not just acting as a proxy for marketing for the U.S. university system.
I think the initiatives taken by Google and Apple – and of course by the collaborating universities – are very interesting. They make it obvious that the fast and often dramatic developments in the news business are also relevant for at least part of the educational system.
The learners – consumers and producers of knowledge and skills – are getting used to free learning and knowledge. Just as is the case for news, it will become increasingly difficult to make people pay for courses and workshops.
Professional teachers and professors will be confronted with teachers and facilitators from outside the profession. Many of those newcomers will be amateurs, but some will be recognized specialists in their own professional networks who have other and possibly more interesting things to teach than the professors in the established educational institutions.
I think that many debates about news gathering – can bloggers be trusted, how to determine whether information is trustworthy, how to earn a living as a professional journalist etc – will run along the same lines for the educators.
As Dan Colman seems to suggest, all this will not just be a matter of publishing courses with prestigious brand names. Those courses will be combined with other material, will be discussed in informal and formal networks, during ad hoc workshops and barcamps.
Virtual environments will help enabling these new learning practices. Using YouTube EDU I easily found this video, in which Harvards father-daughter team of Charles Nesson and Rebecca Nesson examine Second Life and the opportunities and problems that this virtual environment confronts.
Roland Legrand