• by Ted McConnell , Featured Contributor, October 1, 2020

As the U.S. educational system goes more and more online, it’s likely to follow the path of incumbent publishers as they adapted to the online world over the past 20 years.

In that regard, the fate of educational institutions is somewhat predictable. Right now, schools have a lot to learn from publishers, and the web economy in general.   

In education, presumably benign parties decide what content is consumed by students. The content creators are not hawking a product. In education, the products are learning and experience. 

In publishing, the product is the same, but the business model is different — that is, in garden-variety publishing, consumers choose what they read.  Also, publishers do not test  the reader’s comprehension. Maybe they should! 

What has changed for education is that suddenly, the distribution of content, even classroom lectures, is electronic.  The reverse direction, in which students are then called upon to produce their own content (tests, etc.) is simply an “interaction.”

Here is a short list of what happens when content becomes electronically distributed. 

It gets copied — that is, stolen.  Harvard English classes will no doubt be available via BitTorrent or some dark web site.  Will I still get a degree if I take the classes that were identical, but lifted? No, but accreditation is a rather fluid subject — and equity theft is rampant. “The Harvard Academy” might appear on a resume, but it is not the school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

Winner takes all. Remember the 120 search engines that existed before Google? Yes, there were that many. Winner (Google) took all. 

Price per unit declines. It used to be that music cost 10 dollars for a CD containing 10 songs. Spotify (or Napster before that) is a perfect model of what happens when the content goes online.  

Consumption or interaction can be anywhere, anytime. Are we going to see the end of campus life? Most teachers would prefer not to be handcuffed to their lectern. 

Everything is reviewable and rank-able. Imagine the chaos as education sinks to the depths of fake reviews and superficial feature comparisons. Here’s a nasty example of that idea in play today: rate my professors. Branding for institutions will become more critical as competition intensifies, due to commoditization of content. 

Access to markets. Now, any publisher can decide they are a school, drop a few ads in Facebook, and bang: instant university.  This makes political or religious interests able to cheaply launch schools.  So, for example, Breitbart could easily become a university. That would have been a joke five years ago. Now, it’s scary because it’s plausible.  

Supply chains are re-intermediated. The campus experience, ostensibly the core coming-of-age ritual, could become independent from the learning experience.  You go to a campus to, you know, hang. Separately, you could pick a curriculum offered by any university.

This unbundling could support specific student lifestyle needs. One in three students entering college, for example, reports a mental health issue (per research from the American Psychological Association), but we treat them all the same way.  

Massive scale. Once, physical limits constrained the size of a school. Once webified, however, millions of students could attend the same class on the same day. Sure, there is still a constraint like handling inbound communication (who will grade all those papers?), but automation and AI will immediately have grist for their respective mills when interaction between students and teachers becomes bits, not molecules.  

Will those weighty and overpriced textbooks go the way of buggy whips? One can only hope. 

Certainly, the idea that people get to control what goes into their head is getting stronger. This is as a result of vast improvements in information choice and quantity. But education is antithetical to that. In education, someone else decides what goes into your head. 

By itself, the virtualization of education might look like progress, but once education becomes as fungible (ergo, commoditized) as the content that defines it, new market dynamics will emerge. 

Unchecked, education-for-profit will descend into the miserable world of other socially important institutions tied to “market forces” (like healthcare). Universities are already ruthless about monetizing their “audience.” How long can they hold moral high ground when future forces are aligning to drag them into the gutter?