Well, I have a certain modest experience of college teaching. I do know, for example, that about twenty years ago, the University of Oregon paid me, as an incident of my duties as a GTF, to write some examination questions for the textbook we were using. The professor needed some examination questions, and he did the natural thing, he told the GTF’s to write some. These went into a departmental question file. At that date, of course, there was no organization in place to centrally collect examination questions. The material in the freshman course was naturally trivial compared to that which graduate students were supposed to be learning. Now, of course, if the professor had been teaching in a community college, instead of a flagship state university, he wouldn’t have had GTF’s, and he might have wanted more services from the book publisher. The effect of the internet is, broadly speaking to make people less isolated, and to enable them to do things based on their common interests.

At that time and place, of course, GTF’s were admonished about not using the department’s photo-copier without permission. When I wanted to make copies, I went to a commercial photocopy shop, and made copies with my own money, or I simply programmed my computer to print off multiple copies, with a dot-matrix ribbon printer, and “fanfold” paper which came in 2000-sheet boxes. In her contemporary academic satire novel, _Moo_, Jane Smiley picks up on this point about the cost of photo-copying. The character “Chairman X” buys a couple of mimeograph stencils, of a type designed to be used in a dot-matrix computer printer, and he buys a ream of mimeograph paper, and pointedly gets a receipt for both, a sum of a couple of dollars. Having drafted a leaflet on his computer, he prints it off to the stencils, and fits them into an old university-own mimeograph machine which has been lying, forgotten, in his office closet. And then he proceeds to print off an unauthorized leaflet in five hundred copies.

The essence of Open-Source is not that it is good at the beginning, but that it gets cumulatively better, as people choose to fix the existing product, rather than start from scratch on a competing product. Linux did not start out all that great, back in the beginning, back in1993, but it got cumulatively better. Now, of course, you have to have a license which grants a “public right to create improvements,” so that, if the original organizer should prove treacherous, someone else can take over.

I expect that different universities will specialize in different things. For example, Virginia Tech has developed a computerized math teaching system, geared to ordinary students, which is therefore more broadly useful than MIT’s advanced offerings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/at-virginia-tech-computers-help-solve-a-math-class-problem/2012/04/22/gIQAmAOmaT_story.html?hpid=z5

The pure mathematician who sent me this link summed it up: “I think I would hate teaching there.” But the students seem to like it.

Flat World Knowledge does not, so far as I know, have a charter to grant degrees. If it did, it would still be at about the level of the University of Phoenix, far below such state institutions as the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. It would also be far below the regional Catholic universities, such as Xavier University in Cincinnati. That makes Flat World Knowledge fundamentally subordinate.

Perhaps it would be helpful if you were to define what you mean by “Ecology of Publishing.”

Changes in the education system tend to start from the top, and work their way downwards. This can mean going from graduate school to undergraduate program to high school, but it can also be lateral, from Harvard and MIT to flagship state universities, and then to teachers’ colleges, and ultimately, to community colleges. At another level, the flow might be from New England prep schools to ordinary high schools. For example, the Boy Scout movement, and later, the Outward Bound movement grew laterally from elite secondary boarding schools, the so-called English “Public Schools” such as Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester. Now, I grant you that undergraduate business schools, Flat World Knowledge’s constituency, are pretty near the bottom, and they will probably be some of the last places to be changed.

Here’s a dirty little secret of Business schools: the core of Business education is accounting knowledge, and with computers, big companies have their accounting so centralized that the vast majority of people who get business degrees will never be allowed to make business decisions of the kind that business school teaches them to make. The computer knows what is on the shelves in a store; with loyalty cards, the computer knows what is sold to whom, and at what time of the day; the computer sets the re-order point; decides whether or not to offer discounts, etc., etc. Business education is thus just about as impractical for the vast majority of business students as studying medieval poetry. Top management might find, by doing a statistical analysis, that sales-people and first-level supervisors with liberal arts backgrounds tend to sell more than those with business-school background.

For someone who has real management potential, the applicable credential is the MBA, not the undergraduate business degree, and to get into a good MBA program, you don’t need an undergraduate business degree. If anything, they prefer someone who has studied something else, such as Engineering or Liberal Arts. In the case of small business, including franchises, the key entrance requirement is not education per se, but capital. A young person can buy into a franchise system _if_ he has relatives willing to lend him the money on terms more favorable than a bank could manage. Given that practically all the substantive assets in a storefront business are either rented or leased, starting with the premises themselves, the investor has to be kinfolk to have a reasonable assurance of getting his money back. A really picky business school might say that its undergraduate program is only for people who can demonstrate “family capital,” liquid assets which relatives could realize without going into debt, ie. no mortgages on houses, or anything like that. You can see that such a realistic approach to business schools would radically weed down the business school textbook market.

There was an interesting event recently at the University of Michigan. The university set up a special entrance requirement for introductory accounting. They felt that too many students wanted to take accounting for the wrong reasons– fear of not getting a job– instead of an actual liking for the subject. So the university set up a requirement in the form of an application essay, similar to those required for MBA programs. They didn’t just take the people with highest grades, but rather, those who could articulate what they planned to do in business.

http://www.businessweek.com/business-schools/when-college-says-yes-but-bschool-says-no-10052011.html

Anyone who was not accepted could take the online course (which does not carry admission to the business school), but of course the professors had figured out that solitary online study would “cool out” most of the online students. They also figured out that very few students would choose to transfer to some place less prestigious, like Wayne State in Detroit, in order to study Business Administration. Students, especially those whose parents are not college graduates, need to be pushed outside of their occupational comfort zones. In various other states, university administrators will be saying: “We’re just as good as Michigan (really, almost, ha, ha), so why can’t we do that?” In a kind of loose concert, based on the academic form of “Keeping up with the Jones,” they are all going to push back, bit by bit, until Business Administration is no longer the default major for marginally qualified students. Businesses are not going to push back very hard, because they really don’t need many accountants. In a computerized regime, a little accountant goes a long way.

Something similar has been happening with the Elementary Education major, incidentally. The better Education schools have been revamping their curricula so that the students spend really a lot of time with children in the university’s demonstration school, starting in the sophomore year, and totaling at least a year of practice-teaching. The students don’t take a lot of “mumbo-jumbo” education courses in lecture halls, using textbooks, because they are doing so much practice-teaching. when not engaged in Practice Teaching, the Elementary Education students are given a good sound Liberal Arts education, approximating the B.A. The system selects for people who are positively good with children, not for ordinary students with weak academic backgrounds. Secondary Education students have, first, to complete an academic Bachelor’s degree, and then they take the Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T), again with a lot of credit for practice-teaching. Of course, as an incident of this kind of program, the demonstration school has a very favorable effective student-teacher ratio. The university professors send their kids there by right, and everyone else competes to get their kid in.

If an undergraduate professional school cannot mount an effective “push-back,” its students tend to be absorbed into the Liberal-Arts college. Liberal Arts is not very textbook-friendly. The understood object is to get students to “read the literature,” and to get in the habit of doing library research. At the earliest feasible class-level, the faculty will start assigning stacks of Great Books, or at least, Important Books, books which have been published some years ago, and have stood the test of time. If such books are not actually in the public domain, they will at least be readily available in used bookstores, and, now, via Amazon. The most basic student exercise, writing a book review, involves summing up the whole of book, so it is not very sensitive to differences in pagination, so it is not very critical to have a particular edition. The very nature of a Great Book discourages re-arranging it in substance. You simply cannot insert a passage in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, claiming this, that, and the other thing, to make it incompatible with previous editions. People would make rude noises at you.

I should like to make an additional argument. The core of undergraduate education, and especially, lower-division undergraduate education is the dormitory. A dormitory is, of course, a device to enable teenagers to get away from home, and start living on their own. They spend their year in the dormitory, make some friends, and club together to rent an apartment in the vicinity for their sophomore year, and, by degrees, transition to living with a potential spouse. The acid test of things like textbooks and tele-courses is ultimately whether the dormitory will countenance them or not, to the point of being willing to rent the student a room. Commuter colleges are less prestigious, but still, if a student lives at home, and spends six hours a day on campus, for a total of thirty hours a week, while taking fifteen hours of courses, that is still fifteen hours per week which he does not have to account to anyone for. Even a commuter campus at mid-day can be the next best thing to a three-ring circus, what with the food trucks, and the buskers, and so on and so forth.