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The New Universities

by Emmanuel Quartey

The Economist announces Economist Education.

This post is in response to The Economist’s Economist Education initiative, as well as Russ Maschmeyer’s fantastic proposal for a new platform for education that is “low cost, scalable, distributed and above all, personalized.”

Imagine if you could take a microecon class that was built on the The Economist’s massive archive - a treasure-chest of information accumulated over the newspaper’s long, distinguished history. The lectures and assignments would draw heavily from the newspaper’s database of first hand reports and insightful commentary, and you would have access to proprietary data and analytic tools, all on the screen of your mobile device of choice.

Or imagine if National Geographic set up NationalGeographic.edu, where you could get certification for classes in Earth Sciences.

Heck, why limit it to publishers? Imagine if you could take a course in digital animation from Pixar or learn food science from Unilever? Who would you rather learn electrical engineering from, a distinguished professor at the Yale School of Engineering, or NASA.edu?

In order for something like this to happen, we would need a set of protocols for assessing mastery as well as a way to compare courses to each other (would “Intro to Microecon” from The Economist cover the same key concepts as a class with the same title, taught by the Financial Times?) In the short term, traditional universities could play a role by putting their stamp of approval on certain courses. Long term, however, I imagine that centers of higher learning will evolve to become pure research centers, while students will gain more of their instruction from the buffet of options available from new, competing sources of education.

I would love your feedback on this very speculative proposal. Would you welcome this new kind of instruction, or do you worry that it would make education hopelessly fragmented?

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