From the President's Desk

A New Phase of the Adventure - (August 19th, 2010) The decision to refocus an institution is never an easy one, nor taken lightly. Fundamentally, we have come to realize that the only way to achieve our goal of bringing free college education to the world is to bring the world to the free college education. After the better part of a year, we have come to the conclusion that our resources are better spent trying to inform the public of what they already have access to than trying to create new resources. The challenge to the free education world is one of noise: the tuition based schools are spending a tremendous amount of advertising dollars to get attention. Some of the keyword marketing has been bid as high as 30.00 per click on college related kewords. It was humbling to realize that free, ad and sponsorship college was viable to deliver, but not viable to promote: something is wrong with this picture. So, here we go, once again tilting at windmills! Collaboration and the New Normal As a young man in the year I moved away from home, my Father gave me a copy of The Great Conversation - a collection of the most influential writings in Science, Art, Literature, Philosophy and Economics in the Western world from Homer to the year 1900. At the time, I received it as an affirmation of the love of learning and ideas that we both shared. Since then, despite several heavy moves up and down many flights of stairs, it has remained one of my greatest treasures. In many ways, the great conversation is the historical antecedent of the open source education model: enrichment of the commons (with attribution) creating a larger learning community who, in turn, enrich the commons by their own contributions. Now however, this exchange has been accelerated to mere minutes instead of decades. “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” ~ Robert Kennedy Education has always had a transformative force - the power to break inertia and open opportunity: to bring a new combination of intellectual effort allowing us to build on the ideas of others and come together in a larger framework. The opportunity, and imperative, upon us is to encourage a mechanic whereby this force is untethered from the staggering costs of delivery that accompany the traditional model: student education without crippling student loans will make education relevant to everyone who wants it.