Summary: Online education is tearing down the classroom walls, making way for new ideas and business opportunities. What will the future of education look like? iTunes: cs.co/tnp - Listen to past episodes, subscribe or write a review. TRANSCRIPT for "Online Education and the Virtual Classroom" written by Eric S. Rabkin: Sometimes the best inventions happen by accident. Sometimes those are the best inventions. One of the world’s great storehouses of biological knowledge is the Animal Diversity Web. In 1995, University of Michigan biology professor Philip Myers needed a textbook for his course, but the book he wanted did not exist. So he decided to use the new medium of the World Wide Web to engage his students in producing the textbook. Myers believed researching, writing, checking and posting information about animal species and their habitats could not only teach students about animal diversity but also help them better understand the science involved. He was right. What he didn't see coming, though, was that ADW would spawn a set of overlapping worldwide communities. Today, over half a million users consult ADW each month -- borrowing information from the crowd-sourced website, as well as adding to it. Myers’ success went well beyond the walls of his university. ADW serves as a key tool in elementary and secondary schools all over the world. And it motivates research in more than 50 universities and colleges. The site continues to grow and has created whole new studies in how one learns and teaches. The most famous intramural project to burst beyond its original walls is Facebook. The story, told in the widely admired 2010 film called "The Social Network," began as an attempt to facilitate dating at Harvard. Today, there are more than one billion active Facebook members -- that's a seventh of the human population of our planet. "The Social Network" was based on Ben Mezrich's 2009 book called "The Accidental Billionaires." It points to the frequent connection on the web between accidental community formation and economic opportunity. Forrester Research did a study last year which noted the rising importance of "accidental entrepreneurs." These may be tech-savvy white collar professionals, or stay-at-home spouses. But they understand the new economy and are driven by profits, not passion. "Accidental entrepreneurs" see opportunities to offer better products and services, and then take advantage of those opportunities, often using consumer technology. According to Forrester, the enterprises of these accidental entrepreneurs, quote: "are growing significantly faster and at the expense of less technically-confident, less agile, less 'connected' small business owners." End quote. Although correspondence courses have existed since the 1840s, when Englishman Isaac Pitman began teaching his new shorthand method by mail , the World Wide Web has enabled an explosion of educational options. To date, most have mimicked so-called "residential courses." The Art Department is a born-digital art school in which six to 20 students per course -- who may live in a dozen different time zones -- meet in real time via educational software. They discuss fellow students' artwork, and receive individual instruction from live staff. Recently, though, virtual education has taken a quantum leap in magnitude and methods. Udacity, Coursera and edX all host MOOCs -- or Massive Open Online Courses -- that, so far, are free for the taking and also free of admissions criteria. They are just beginning to experiment with ways to validate credentialing and to develop models for economic support, at least partially supplied by students, their employers or school districts. Individual MOOCs can have thousands of students per course. This sort of education must depend on an automated process, crowd-sourcing or both. To the extent that crowd-sourcing is involved, MOOCs facilitate the development of accidental communities. Eric S. Rabkin,
