I recently gave two lectures in Colombia at both Rosario University and the Universidad Nacional, at the invitation of Carolina Botero, Creative Commons lawyer, and Julion Gaitan, juridical scholar at Rosario.

These lectures touched upon the future of education and the impact of horizontal peer learning networks on the future of educational institutions.

I tried to formulate ten theses about the topic.

While the theses acknowledge the strong transformative potential of peer to peer learning on traditional institutions, it also warns for those that hide behind technology to achieve a destruction of democratic education, and want to replace it with a pure marketplace.

PART ONE: ANALYSIS

1. Learners can route around educational institutions

This is the very first and important consequences, i.e. people are increasingly learning from each other, and are no longer limited by formal offers. Hence, universities are losing their monopoly of higher learning, as learners can look at each other, but also to both private and non-profit initiatives.

2. The impact of open accreditation

Learning is one thing, recognition another. In a social world, where community specific experiences and recognition cannot necessarily be easily translated, learners will increasingly look to new forms of accredition, inclusive peer accreditation. Hence, universities will not only lose their monopoly of higher learning, but also their monopoly of accredition.

3. The crisis of value

The market is a mechanism for the allocation of resources towards rival goods, where there is a tension between supply and demand. Yet, as learning is democratized, it paradoxically leads to a, in market terms, an oversupply of learned people, hence to its inevitable evaluation. In addition, the increasing ease to create use value through networks and online platforms, coupled with difficulties in monetization, creates a dysfunctional equilibrium between social innovation by increasingly autonomous civil society, and the market which benefits from it. This means that universities are co-producing the precarious workforce.

4. The dark side of learner autonomy

Paradoxically, the emancipator of peer learning networks, in its initial stages, penalizes even more those that have difficulties connecting, or who lack the cognitive skills for online participation. Hence the necessity to consider universal broadband as a human right, but also the necessatity for insuring broad network literacies in all layers of the population.

5. The dark side of neoliberalism

Since the 80’s, the ‘efficiency’ paradigm, the privatization of research results, and the stress on preparing students for ‘useful’ jobs that fit within the existing economic system, have led to a weakening of deep and humanistic education, as well as increasing inequality of access. The neoliberal meltdown of 2008 has exacerbated the crisis of higher education, which is becoming more costly and multi-tiered, thereby hierarchising or excluding the broader mass of students. This risks creating a tiered system, in which the privileged can enjoy face to face education in prestigious institutions, while others are forced to rely on online and more routine learning equivalents.

PART TWO: SOLUTIONS

6. The new transforms but does not always need to replace the old
It is of course very true that digitalization creates many new possibilities to ‘liberate’ education from limitations of time and space, and can increase access to learning. It is also true that online education has it own form of sociality. However, high tech requires high touch. A virtualization of education REQUIRES the continued existence of physical locations for intense face to face and human contact. One should especially be weary of a digital discourse that really is an argument for a total functionalization and commercialization of education.

7. We need educational commons

There should not be universal standardization of courses, but rather subject domains will and should become knowledge commons, offering a wide variety of material for teachers and students to use. Virtualization cannot be an excuse for uniformisation and commodification of education.

8. Education becomes constructive

The greatest advance offered by the new technological affordances is not distance learning or the translation of the industrial model of teaching in the virtual sphere, but rather that it offers new possibilities for the co-creation of value. It offers the opportunity to create an education which is directly productive in social value, rather than as an activity divorced and separate from real life. Students can become peer producers of social innovation, interlinked with passionate and professional communities, working on common projects for the advancement of humankind.

9. Education becomes combinatory

The emergence of peer to peer learning does not mean that it replaces all other forms of learning, but rather that it creates more pluralistic possibilities. Learning alone, learning from experts and learning from and through each other become different modalities to be combined.

10. Education is open = the future of education is open

P2P learning does not mean the future of education is written and that we can predict what it will become, or that ‘universities will disappear’. Rather it means that we have more possibilities to co-create that future of education.