If This…Then What?

I wrote in a few posts ago, I rebuilt my Netvibes account to include more E-Learning feeds. At the same time I also added a few new tag subscriptions in my Delicious account including elearning, virtualeducation, etc., etc. Like my Netvibes account I find it impossible to keep up with all the links that come to me with a tag subscription but every few days I check in and look at the first few pages of the links that are there. Last week I stumbled upon links for School of Everything and Kiwork. Seemingly unrelated in their target markets and audiences, these two site did get the wheels turning in my head.

Let me start with School of Everything. There are many sites out there like this-you select a “teacher” and you become a student of theirs, virtually or F2F if the person is geographically close. Almost every topic imaginable id represented here including hobbies, most taught with experienced practitioners and or academics. In fact, when I searched for courses in physics I ended up with 2 pages of results. Some offer face to face tutoring, others will do F2F and/or virtual classes. Most of the “teachers” are in the UK, Canada and the US but I found this differs depending on what topic you search under. Ok, so what? There are lots of sites like this, lots of online virtual tutoring sites, nothing new here. Yes…and no. What got me thinking was that this could just as easy be the School of the Future. What if all these teachers were accredited? What if a combination of courses/subjects offered led to an regionally accredited degree? What if, based on your selected combination of course, that regionally accredited degree could be tailor made for you as a student or your child? Want an IB degree, take these courses. Want a more typical US degree with AP classes, etc. take these classes. Soon, you start to see the possibilities. How long will it be before these sites develop into online schools that can pool teachers from varying disciplines that can form collaborative courses, where the teachers are experts in their fields AND are accredited teachers, where professionals who have had a previous desire to teach but didn’t because of the multitude of reasons not to become a teacher, decide to teach in this way to supplement their income? How soon until these schools partner with our brick and mortar dinosaur schools to further round out their programs offering F2F classes in art, science labs, band and music, and the like? How long? I feel it is not a matter of “IF”, rather a matter of “WHEN”. And, when “WHEN” happens, will you be ready to jump on this train? Will you want to?

The second site I found was kiwork. Again, this is not the only site of this nature but still noteworthy. If the face of education will change than so will the way we work. Kiwork is an example of this. It is a project management and professional outsourcing site. If you have a project you can search other people, experts in their field, and all collaborate on it. It is virtual but I suppose if by some chance you found experts that were geographically desirable, these meetings could be F2F as well. So, like School of Everything, here you have the changing nature of how we work in the 21st century. As many have said before, it is impossible to know everything, but now the people who can fill in your gaps are clicks away. How great would this be for developing good training and e-learning modules? Developing these typically includes, instructional designers, graphic artists, multi-media experts, project managers…the list goes on. However, now all those people, and a wide variety of them (and therefore a variety of skill sets) also is available. Everyone is their own agent, demanding fair market prices for their services. Is this how our kids will work when they graduate? We have all see the countless You Tube vids out there describing how our students will have jobs that aren’t invented, so is this the new work marketplace? Will people start becoming their own free agents? Will many of these new jobs find their place in this outsourcing world? Will we all be outsourced? By ourselves? Obviously, working like this means that you do not receive a lot of the benefits , tangible and intangible, that you receive when working for a formal organization but this like all things can be overcome.

So, if this…then what?