Disaggregation of Education by Internet Techologies

There was a very interesting conference on the impact of Internet on education. It was organized by Union Square Ventures in New York City. Titled "Hacking Education", it brought together venture capitalists, educators, administrators, publishers and many other leading players in the education market.

There was broad consensus that the internet is enabling substantial changes in the way we learn and teach. It has always been possible to learn outside of a school setting. The ubiquitous connectivity and very low cost of content production and distribution seems to enable the unbundling of key components of education.

Dissagregation - David Wiley broke education into these components, 1) content provisioning, 2) research - conducted, archived, and disseminated, 3) help provided to a student with a question on the content, 4) a social life, and 5) issuing credentials.

Historically all of these components were bundled together in the experience of on-site education in a K-12 or University context. Already today, it is possible for a student to get many of these services outside the walls of a traditional educational institution.


Further ....

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is suggesting that the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like those industries, education can be peer produced, delivered as bits, and curated by a community. Like the music and newspaper industries, the cost structures embedded in the education industry's current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses.

We are already seeing a constant stream of bits of education materials appear on the web.

Mashedge is playing a pioneer role in helping users aggregate these bits of education materials to suit their specific needs. For example:

1. We have collected the Math curriculum for classes 1-10 based on the Singapore Math curriculum.
2. We have also aggregated material to help prepare for the Math syllabus for IIT JEE (joint examination material).
   

If you are a school, university, teacher, or even a student, you can use Mashedge to collect bits of education material and make it useful for you or your students.