What's a MOOC?

I cannot get enough of the free courses available online. When the kids graduate, I’m going to become a professional student.

It’s a cool idea but sooner or later the idealists run into economic realities: whatever has value, has cost. So sooner or later, cost factors end up shaping delivery and constrain the free flow of information. It’s neither good nor evil. It just is.

One of the quickest and most cost effective ways to develop platforms and software, though, is to opensource it.

With this project, edX hopes to become the “Linux of learning”. Aren’t you a big Linux fan, Aaron?

[Aaron Blumer]

It’s a cool idea but sooner or later the idealists run into economic realities: whatever has value, has cost. So sooner or later, cost factors end up shaping delivery and constrain the free flow of information. It’s neither good nor evil. It just is.

What has value is not the information. A lot of this information is widely available. Universities don’t make their money and reputation by patenting/trademarking/copyrighting the information imparted in their classes. What has value is the name that you have on your degree (Cal-Berkeley instead of Fresno State for instance) and the superior contacts that you will make and opportunities that you will have at a Princeton or Cornell than you will have at a directional school. So a person could take advantage of all these free courses and still not get a Stanford degree or not get to personally know the former vice presidents of Wall Street investment banks that live in Stanford, or have the son of an oil tycoon as your college roommate or fraternity brother.

And what makes the information “free” is that it is piggybacking off what is being developed for the paying customers. These universities already have the internet infrastructure available to them because their students need them. (Indeed, they have far more servers and bandwidth than their students will ever need.) And the universities can either simply provide the lectures, notes, etc. that was already developed for the students, or hire people to create the online content. Lots of the elite universities are filthy rich, with endowments into the billions, and you really don’t have to pay people very much to create the content anyway. It isn’t like you have to get your Nobel laureates to do this stuff. (Plus, not a few Nobel laureates might be willing to do it anyway simply because they like or support it. A lot of these guys are already rich and are semi-retired, and just like to teach and deliver content.)

I am sorry, but when you say that anything that has value has cost, you are just wrong. IT professionals and programmers, for example, get free content off the Internet all the time. Not only that, but the free stuff online is generally more current than the university offerings, which are often a year or two behind (or more) even at the top schools. And not just for the technical people. If you are into literature, philosophy or some other liberal arts discipline, there are tons of excellent public domain and uncopyrighted books out there. You just have to know how to find it (and there are lots of excellent resources out there to help you find it). Again, you can’t get a degree in mathematics, computer engineering or American literature by self-studying on the Internet. So it is the sheepskin that costs money. The information doesn’t.

I am sorry, but when you say that anything that has value has cost, you are just wrong. IT professionals and programmers, for example, get free content off the Internet all the time

This is where the illusion comes from. What happens in these cases is that the cost is being diverted from the person accessing the work. There really is no free lunch. Somebody paid for it with their time, talents, work, maybe even with money.

But value and cost don’t always get converted into any recognized currency.

The open source projects that have thrived have usually had a large number of enthusiasts basically donating their abilities. Cost still exists, but because of a large number of participants, and a strong desire to contribute, the cost is spread out, and many who create the value are content to do so with nothing more than personal satisfaction as the compensation.

But where there is value there is always cost. It’s like gravity and mass.

Linux fan? Well, yes and no. I’ve certainly benefited from Linux, as have zillions of people. I don’t know the %, but I bet the vast majority of web content is on Linux servers.

SI is driven by a free open source content management system, running in connection with a free and open source database system (MYSQL), served up by free open-source web server software (NGINX), humming along on a box with a free open source operating system (Linux) and it’s full of content that writers share without charge. A few ads cover the server hardware rent, a bit of the development and maintenance costs.

So I’m not against the open source model at all. But the idea that there is no cost is a fanciful dream. It’s just spread out cost, paid for in the currency of hobbyist-fun (often in addition to corpororate sponsors!… e.g., Ubuntu and Canonical).

One more observation: it’s sort of true that “information is free.” But if you dig into it a bit you run into a problem: how is any particular chunk of information ever isolated from the mass I’ll call “all the information that was is or ever will be?” What I’m getting at is that isolating information (a.k.a. “capturing” it) and putting relevant info in workable chunks where it is of benefit to people—this has value. And because skill and work are involved in doing that, there is cost.

I am so putting these courses on my curriculum vitae.

You are looking to turn this into another opportunity to lecture the Obama voters about free healthcare, free pre-K or whatever else the left-liberals cook up. Here’s the actual context: open source and non-fee based learning have existed for decades because there have always been people motivated to provide it without charging, whatever that motivation is. And that is why when you say “So sooner or later, cost factors end up shaping delivery and constrain the free flow of information” it is just not true, because the quality and availability of the free information is getting wider and better. In the 1980s, open source meant getting free MS-DOS drivers for your sound card, text based email clients and knock offs of Tetris over your 9600 baud modem, and open courses meant getting some instructional video (VHS or Betamax) on French cooking from the mail.

Now, you can get high performance server and application software that is just as good as what you would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) from Microsoft, Oracle etc. in licenses without paying a dime. And you can learn all the skills that you need to become a systems administrator to run that open-source based system without needing 4 years and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans getting a B.S. in Information Technology. Or if technology is not your thing, you can also learn enough languages to be a U.N. translator (Spanish to do business in Miami or L.A., French to travel abroad, or Biblical Hebrew and Greek for your expository preaching) by downloading them from I-Tunes University.

So if “It’s a cool idea but sooner or later the idealists run into economic realities: whatever has value, has cost. So sooner or later, cost factors end up shaping delivery and constrain the free flow of information” was going to happen, it would have long ago. If anything, creating and disseminating content is getting cheaper and easier than ever. Example: creating the first VeggieTales cartoon took 6 college educated adults a year and practically their entire life savings, and then they needed a commercial distribution deal for large audiences to see it. So yeah, they had to charge for the videos because A) they had to make a living themselves and B) their distributor needed to cover the cost of manufacturing, marketing and shipping the videos with enough left over to provide a living for themselves also. It was neither good nor evil. It just was. (The VeggieTales people refusing to teach Jesus Christ was the evil part, but again, wrong context.)

Right now, junior high Christian school (or homeschooled) students can use (free!) animation and other software to create their own even more sophisticated (both technologically and hopefully theologically) cartoons in mere weeks, AND and they can upload them to YouTube or Facebook and have people all over the world view them in a matter of minutes so they don’t have to rely on ZonderKidz or whoever to distribute it. Which means that it is now easy enough to produce content at your leisure in your spare time (without needing to get paid for it) and you can disseminate it without needing to pay book publishers, DVD pressers, stores for shelf space, etc.

There is no free lunch, true, but plenty of ways for people who A) personally like cooking and B) believe that teaching other people how to make their own lunches is a worthy way to spend their spare time to go about doing it without charging people for it. You just use your I-Phone (or Android or Windows phone) to record yourself preparing and baking eggplant lasagna, upload it to your linked Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts with the touch of a button and presto. You no longer need so much as your own cooking show on local public access television, let alone a national recipe book publishing deal (i.e. things that force you to charge money when you really just want people to learn how to cook healthy meals for their families). And that is today. Who knows what is going to be available tomorrow.

JobK, I think you’re not getting my point.

Let me try another angle. Where does value come from?

It’s generally agreed that scarcity is a factor, but it’s possible to imagine scarce things that still have no value (say, a rare disease, for example).

Marx’s answer was that value comes from labor + materials, nothing more.

Others have more complex answers. But I think it’s pretty hard to find value in anything without the elements of time, labor, thought and then the whole business of human affections on the receiving end.

But whenever someone puts time, effort, energy, creativity into something, that is itself cost. He cannot put the same time, effort and energy into something else. It’s spent. If he has other means of putting food on the table, he can create stuff and part with it for free. But what he’s really doing is paying for it himself. There is no cost to the recipient, but there is still cost.

I guess I can’t prove it (yet). To me it’s self evident. If something has value, there was cost in creating it. That cost is handled either by the creator or by a buyer or by a donor—or it’s defrayed in some other way. Nonetheless, there was cost.