SBA

Democratisation of Knowledge

I started teaching myself to play guitar forty-something years ago, with a second-hand classical guitar and a classical / folk songbook as a combined birthday and Christmas present from my parents. I still have the book, from which I learned basic chords and technique, but the tunes within were soon displaced by many books of contemporary music scores. My pocket money was largely spent on these, at one pound fifty to ten pounds each in the early 1970’s they were incredibly expensive, but they were how I learned and money was a constraint to the pace of my development. 

Recently, on a guitar player’s group on Facebook, someone with a newly acquired guitar and no idea how to tune it, never mind play it, asked about how to learn. Recommendations came in, thick and fast - not for tutors or books, but for online courses, most of which are free of charge. Out of curiosity I had a look at one on the Internet, www.justinguitar.com - and it’s awesome. Hundreds of high quality lessons and songs to learn from, all with excellent tutorial videos, by a very talented tutor, in a structured course able to take you from total novice to at least a good intermediate standard. Reality is that I would be a much better player now if facilities like this had been available in my youth, and that anyone starting out learning guitar today has a massive advantage because all this tuition and knowledge is available, for free, to anyone with access to the Internet. Online tuition has democratised access to learning to make music.

A few years ago I wanted to learn a new programming language - Python. Over the past forty-plus years I have been competent in at least a dozen programming languages, and as with the guitar I largely learned the quirks of each programming language from books. Python is the exception, I found a great free new course online: “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming using Python” by the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - one of the best technology universities in the world and alma mater to many of the great names in Silicon Valley. Again the tutor, a senior Professor at MIT, gives each of the one-hour lectures as a video, but this is a real undergraduate university course and the video is recorded as he lectures to his real MIT students in the lecture theatre. World class tuition, about technical knowledge and skills directly relevant to my profession, online for free.

Both the guitar tuition and the MIT computer science course are examples of “MOOCs” - Massive Open Online Courses, defined as  “online courses aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web”. The first MOOCs started to emerge about a decade ago, and are changing the way we learn and our access to knowledge, globally.

MOOCs are, as their definition implies, open to all via the web. There are normally no mandatory entrance requirements and no fees - unless you wish to buy the printed hardcopy course materials, enrol for support by a tutor, or get formal certification that you have completed the course and taken the relevant examination. In this way most MOOCs epitomise the “Freemium” service model, although some business and professional online training providers claim to provide MOOCs but only to those who will pay. In most cases where there is an access fee it is very modest, typically tens of dollars for a course for which the classroom attendance price would run into thousands of pounds.

What has this go to do with business in the Isle of Man? Most of us business and professional people should be undertaking continual professional development, to keep our knowledge and skills up to date. A quick Internet search for Accounting MOOC, or Python MOOC, Leading Change MOOC, Human Resources Management MOOC or whatever you want to learn more about, will typically return a plethora of options from a range of providers, enabling us to learn at our convenience from home or work at low or no cost unless we want the “extras”.  Nowadays there are no excuses for not keeping our skills up to date.

Similarly, if we wish to provide inexpensive business-related education to our employees, all we have to do is Google the MOOCs until we find something that we can recommend to them. If formal certification is desired then our choice becomes more restricted and more expensive - but it is available from very credible educational and professional institutions.

We’ve all heard the adage “If it sounds too good to be true it probably is”, so how credible is credible? MOOC providers include MIT as mentioned above, Harvard University, Stanford University, the Open University, ACCA, Caltech and many other names which are internationally known and respected. Whilst the MOOC format may be intentionally low cost, many providers have global credibility and their MOOC offerings reflect this, they can’t afford to be seen delivering inferior product.

So, from a business perspective, the Internet has made it much easier and cheaper for us to learn new subjects and keep our core professional and technical skills up to date. We can encourage our employees to learn and develop in their jobs without needing massive training budgets, and they can do so in a way which doesn’t take them out of the workplace for days at a time.

It has also done the same for our competitors worldwide - one of the key drivers of Globalisation has been lower-cost and better-distributed access to the knowledge we need to perform a business or technical function. The Internet in general, and MOOCs in particular, have accelerated developing countries’ access to the knowledge required to compete with first world economies. As such these represent an important facet of the global trade war, because if we do not keep our skills and knowledge up to date it is likely that someone far away will learn to surpass us. 

You get the picture. Many senior and middle managers in British business are unfamiliar with MOOCs. Living in our highly developed first world economies, we have received traditional and expensive academic and business education in the classroom and on the job, often from mediocre tutors, and we assume that that’s how it is, for us and our staff. It was that way, but not any more. Some of the world’s best experts and educators have used the Internet to expand their audiences, and if we’re not listening then we’re missing out. 

MOOCs have become so popular that there are now “platforms” of MOOCs - online businesses whose purpose is to aggregate information about specific courses and make them easier to find. These include edX - originally established by MIT and Harvard University; Coursera, NovoEd and Udacity - each spun out from Stanford University; Futurelearn - owned by the Open University but featuring free courses from many UK universities - and the list goes on. To help understand the popularity of MOOCs, edX as an example offers over 950 courses from 90 or so partner institutions around the world, and the UK-based Futurelearn claims over five million learners accessing its courses. 

Living on the Isle of Man, and not wishing to denigrate our very good local training providers, we have to accept the reality that because we are a small society there are many topics and specialisms for which there is no formal tuition available locally - we must either travel off-island or use distance-learning and self-study in order to acquire new knowledge. In this respect we have much in common with larger but less-developed nations which have neither the money nor the infrastructure to create their own local higher-education capabilities, and with remote outposts of first-world nations where distance and scale inhibit local delivery of a broad range of subjects. Low-cost online learning has become an essential tool for residents of such places, MOOCs are transforming academic, technical, professional and business education and we should probably make more use of the excellent online courses available instead of assuming that specialist learning for us or our staff necessarily means costly time and travel away from the island.