Stephen Downes (who is almost always an interesting read), has issued a call to arms for academics and academic institutions to stop relying on proprietary content. To me, this has the ring of the inevitable to it. Universities are, among other things, content factories. With the Internet available to dramatically lower production and distribution costs, why should they pay the textbook companies anymore? Why not lower the cost of education and increase access?
Of course, there’s a flip side to this. If universities are distributing free content, then professors will no longer be able to supplement their income by writing or editing textbooks, etc. I have a few friends in academia who are already feeling threatened by online learning. It’s the usual fear that the administration will see their value in their content; once that content is pried from their hands (for no cost), they become expendable. There is some truth to this fear, too; once you have good content, why not use a standardized curriculum and pay (at lower wages) teachers to cover the content?
If you follow this train of thought to its conclusion, universities will have to develop separate and distinct compensation (and tenure credit) plans for production of research, production of pedagogical content, and teaching of classes. Somebody has to compensate professors for the time that they put into creating new teaching content. This is not to say that I think Downes is wrong or is somehow suggesting something unethical; to the contrary. I’m simply suggesting that a necessary consequence of the change that he is calling for (and perhaps predicting) is a fundamental change in faculty compensation schemes.
By the way, this article is published in a fascinating new journal/experiment called Pitch. I highly recommend checking it out.