# The great international OCW debate


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*I am doing a course on global governance and educational change, and we
have been going through standard theories of political science and
international relations theory. This week, we had to write a reflection
paper to apply some of these theories on a topic of our choosing, to
prove that we had understood them. I chose to write an imagined (and
exaggerated) dialogue about the MIT Open CourseWare. Don’t take this too
seriously, and none of these necessarily reflect my own views.*

**The International Debate on the MIT Open CourseWare**

*Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Economist’s annual policy maker
debate hosted at Oxford University. This year we will be presenting the
statement “MIT Open CourseWare and similar projects help promote
educational equality in the world, and should be promoted”. We have a
distinguished panel tonight. Our first section will focus on the
national American context, and Professor Compensatory Liberal will go
first.*

**Professor Compensatory Liberal**: Dear attendees, I support today’s
statement. America benefits from its wide variety of educational
providers, both private and public, and we are proud of the diversity
and entrepreneurialism evident in our educational system. However, there
are large groups that are under-served and lack access to high-quality
education, whether this is due to financial difficulties, or an
inflexible life-situation. Making high-quality courses from one of
America’s premier institutions available to these citizens will go a
long way in compensating for this lack of access, and will hopefully set
an example that other institutions can follow.

**Professor Pure Liberal**: I disagree with this statement. Having a
large and diverse body of educational providers, including public,
private and for-profit actors, is – as my esteemed colleague stated –
one of the strengths of our nation. It is quite appropriate that
educational services should come at a cost, because they are very
expensive to provide, and it is fair – countless studies have shown that
gaining a college degrees is an investment that pays for itself several
times in increased lifetime income. The state has decided to subsidy a
part of this cost, because the positive externality of increasing the
educational level of the population is so high that without a subsidy,
less education would be consumed than is socially optimal. However,
providing education for free completely distorts the market place, and
risks putting for-profit providers out of business, and decreasing the
competition in the market, thus hurting the consumer.

**Professor Pure Liberal 2**: Esteemed colleague, I respectfully
disagree. While all your premises are well stated, you do not accurately
consider the function of MIT Open CourseWare. Since MIT does not provide
accreditation, which is what most educational consumers ultimately seek,
MIT OCW does not compete with other educational providers. Instead, it
provides very valuable functions for MIT. Primarily, it is a marketing
tool, which has helped shore up MIT’s reputation as the “gold standard”
for engineering training in the world. 60% of all incoming students cite
MIT OCW as a factor in their choosing the institution. Internally, the
courses are also very helpful to students selecting classes, or wanting
to review material. Therefore, MIT OCW is a shrewd strategy from MIT to
better position themselves in the market, and compete for students. This
is a legitimate part of doing business, and something we should be
supporting.

**Professor Socialist**: First to the previous speaker, I resent the
notion that education is a good to be consumed. Education in a socialist
society would be a human right. The education provided at MIT however,
is an elite education for the capitalist managerial class which is
completely inaccessible to the working class. The OCW project is simply
a ploy to detract attention from the fact that working class children
are excluded from attending MIT, and taking advantage from close
interaction with professors, experience working in labs, the
participation in learning communities, etc. This kind of quality
education will always be unavailable to ordinary students in a
capitalist system.

**Professor Socialist 2**: Esteemed colleague, I respect your views, but
in this case I will have to disagree. You speak almost enviously of MIT
as high quality education. Remember that universal education was
instituted to socialize children into workers who could show up on time,
work sustained for long periods of time, and not question authority. It
is true that transformatory learning based on for example the Freirian
model can be a powerful act of resistance in a capitalist society,
however what MIT does is to take the most creative youth and mold them
into model workers for the “innovation economy”. Their newest project to
spread their educational materials to everyone, is simply a ploy to get
working class men and women studying and improving their skills for free
in their own time, which will benefit the companies they work for, but
not themselves.

*Well, we thank you for your views on MIT Open CourseWare in the
American context. Now we are widening the scope of the debate, to
consider the impact of MIT Open CourseWare on the international stage,
and we have a mix of American and international contributors. Professor
American Realist?*

**Professor Liberal Internationalist**: Every human being in the world
has an equal right to education and personal development. The current
situation is that educational opportunities are very inequitably
distributed throughout the world, and in many countries youth lack
access to quality higher education. As a world community, we need to
come together to pull up those who need it. The MIT OCW is a wonderful
project that let’s anyone in the world be a “fly on the wall” of the
MIT, and radically widens access to one of the world’s premier research
and teaching institutions. Hopefully many similar projects will be
created, so that we will have a chance of reaching the Millenium
Development Goals.

**Professor American Realist**: If this project was simply available
inside America, using a similar license to the one developed in the
Australian school system, which limits usage to the national context,
the situation would be very different. Strengthening the human capital
in the US, leading to a strengthening of both the commercial
productivity, and perhaps also our armies would certainly be a laudable
objective. However, America’s educational system, the best in the world,
is a key to our national competitiveness on the world stage. By making
these resources available internationally, you are undermining our key
advantage, and in extremis threatening the global American hegemony that
preserves world peace and our prosperity.

**Professor American Realist 2**: While I wholeheartedly agree with the
assessment made by my colleague, I wanted to add that security, and
failed states, is a large concern for us at the moment. If it could
somehow be shown that MIT OCW could increase the human capital in
conflict zones, and reduce the probability for conflict, even by a small
amount, this would be something quite support-worthy. Of course, access
should not be extended to the whole world, but only to the areas that
national defence and security dictate that we help.

**Professor Australian Pure Liberal**: I want to reiterate the concern
that my colleague Professor Pure Liberal espoused earlier. The
international trade in educational services is one of the fastest rising
sectors of the economy, and one that brings benefits both to exporting
countries and importing countries. These free resources constitute an
unfair challenge to our producers of learning materials who have
contributed so much to the increase of quality learning opportunities in
the Asia-Pacific region, and serves to incalculate in people the belief
that very expensive learning resources ought to be free, thus
undermining future increases in this global trade.

**Professor Neo-institutionalist**: There is already a trend of
increasing convergence among educational systems in different nation
states, as they tend to align themselves with the “imagined community”
of the global modern society. Programs such as MIT OCW make important
contributions to this process, by sharing the “gold standard”
educational materials, which help shape expectations around curriculum
among universities, students and lecturers.

In fact, Chinese universities have produced more than 250 book-length
comparative reports on the differences between MIT OCW curricula and the
curricula taught in Chinese schools, with the express purpose to improve
the quality of education in China to “international standards”. Indeed,
not only the educational content itself, but also the pedagogical
methods and lecture styles are being transmitted through the videos
available, and many professors in developing countries have reported
modifying their own teaching based on this. Such a global convergence
towards a “gold standard” is a natural and positive process, and MIT OCW
is a wonderful contribution to this.

**Professor Latin-American World-system Theorist**: The previous speaker
analyses the world without any relevant historical context, and presents
a fairy-tale view of the global processes that actually take place.
Research, scholarly publishing, and top university education is
concentrated in the Anglo-Saxon centre of the world, all conducted in
the English language according to a certain epistemology and grounded in
a system of production. The MIT OCW has two distinct very negative
effects on the developing countries of the world. Firstly, it
legitimizes MIT as the global leader in teaching, and the material and
knowledge that they are transmitting as the material “most worth
knowing”, which will “help us” move ahead. Their knowledge is not
relevant to a struggling developing country, and their ways of knowing
block out the local and indigenous ways of knowing that we need to
develop.

Secondly, it presents the illusion that everyone in the world have
access to high quality education. These courses will merely benefit the
urban elites in our countries, who already embrace Western knowledge and
ideas of progress, to the detriment of their own people who cannot
afford clean water, let alone an internet connection. In order to
develop our educational system so that it truly benefits our people, we
must close the windows to the flood of Western educational materials
that are attempted introduced through loans, or even as “free”, and
concentrate on our own language and heritage.

**Professor International Norms**: The idea of freely and openly sharing
educational resources is an emerging norm on the national and
international arena. It’s an idea that traces its heritage back to the
open source movement, and also to the very fundaments of science and the
academia. It has been introduced by a number of norm entrepreneurs, such
as MIT, the Hewlett Foundation, and individuals and groups that struggle
to promote this norm, both in the US, and on the international arena.

They have had some success, with Open CourseWare projects started in
many countries, for example Japan, Mexico, Korea, China, France and
Holland, however the norm has still not reached the tipping point where
it would lead to a norm cascade. Although a number of groups have signed
on, no countries have as yet adopted open access to educational
resources as a national norm, or something that they want to push in
international fora. The creation of international networks often
precedes this process, and an encouraging factor is that UNESCO has
thoroughly endorsed this movement, and indeed were the ones who in 2002
coined the word “open educational resources”.

This movement has the potential to bring much benefit to the world, and
contrary to what some previous speakers have alluded to, Open CourseWare
is not an imperialist or capitalist ploy. The movement is very
supportive of every country contributing and sharing of their valuable
and unique material, and as mentioned, there is already OCW available
from developing countries such as China, Vietnam and Mexico, which can
be shared with the world. As one example, the Indian Institutes of
Technology have put over thousand hours of video on Youtube.

In addition, because OCW utilizes an open license, the material can be
remixed and adapted in many ways. Thus, the material can be translated
to local languages, and edited to suit local conditions. (The same is of
course true for Chinese and Japanese material – it can be translated to
English, and used in American universities. Unfortunately, that does not
seem to have happened yet). In this way, OCW indeed does constitute one
global trend of sharing, but one that is equal, not a one-way transfer
of knowledge and ideology from the West to the rest.

**Professor Global Transformer**: The only way we can achieve an
equitable and sustainable world is to prioritize grassroots initiatives
that treasure local knowledge and locally produced products, together
with a radically inclusive democracy. Although the model of the elite
MIT university is anachronistic, and not worthy of emulation, the fact
that is the MIT OCW material is presented with an open license. This
means that we can repurpose it and borrow from it when we design our
community adult education intiatives, and online peer-to-peer learning
communities. In that sense, this material is certainly useful.

*I thank all the participants for their participation. Good night.*

Stian

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