Uni-tube

I've just been watching a TED talk and it made me think - wouldn't it be amazing if we used the internet to democratise learning especially higher education. 

Higher education as it is at the minute is pretty expensive - whoever is paying. It's also designed for an elitist system. 3+ years hidden away from the rest of the world living apart from your family and community. And at the most 'elitist' universities structures that make it very difficult to engage in economically productive work. 

What about if we filmed and made available ALL higher education lectures to anybody and made uni lectures free to whoever wanted to go and people would just go to there local uni but when studying a subject you could watch lectures on that subject from any uni. It would massively increase the quality of teaching. We could call it unitub!

Then academic papers would have to be freely available - maybe through local library or cost reasonable amounts like say 50p a paper - seriously if you wrote a good paper and charged 50p and had a nation that had a culture of lifelong learning - you'd make a lot more than you do currently by writing a paper.

Lectures would have to be publicly funded - but it would be worth the investment because you would have one of the most educated populations in the world and that would be an enormousness resource.

You could have pop up study groups; people who want to talk about a certain lecture or paper or question could put an event on unitube and all meet at a coffee shop or library or something. This also would fundementely shift understandings of learning from ones where the teacher imparts knowledge to the student to one where we all learn from each other and all learning and knowledge is valuable. It would change attitudes to problem solving and stratergising in the work place because we'd have a culture of collective discussion and interrogation. 

If you really want to insist on the tyranny of exams - which are no sensible way to assess peoples ability. You could still run exams and people could pay to do them  rather than paying for the learning. 

And people could still pay to 'go to uni' if they really want - charge them a fortune to spend 3 years getting pissed and the rest of us can get on with life and take part in continuous learning. 

I have a list of about 4 or 5 Masters I'd like to do - mostly because I think they would hugely benefit the work I do with young people. There's a lot of research I can't access cause its just to expensive - what's the point in doing research into better ways of working with young people if practitioners are never going to read it? 

In summary I think what I'm trying to say is knowledge should not be privately owned. So I haven't got the time or the know how (writing a blog is about the most technical advanced thing I'm capable of) for this idea so if anyone wants to run with it please do. And a plea to lecturers, academics and universities out there if you want to do something really subversive in response to tuition fees why not make lectures and papers publicly available?