Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 43)

is far less than it used to be, which means that investors can spread their money around to more entrepreneurs and ideas. And the entrepreneurs themselves can “fail faster,” a crucial idea in an ecosystem driven by experimentation and groping around for the new new thing. Instead of shooting for the moon by building a beautiful, expensive product and hoping like hell that the whole world comes to your door, the idea now is to build the “minimal viable product,” get it to the market quickly, watch what happens, and iterate like crazy. Because the Cloud is so cheap, it doesn’t take much in the way of money to do this. Because the scale of the entire world is so large, the potential to get big is vast. If that doesn’t work, everyone can move on to the next thing with relatively little time and money wasted. In the future, anyone with an idea will be able to build a rocket, aim it at the gigantic trillion-dollar market of education, and light the fuse. ho will hit the target? I have no idea. It might be someone like Eren Bali, who is in his late twenties and grew up in a rural village in Turkey, near the Iraqi border. A math prodigy, Bali had nowhere to go but the Internet to feed his hunger for information. With free materials he managed to cobble together online, he learned enough to enter and win several international math competitions. That led him to start a Web site and, perhaps inevitably, fall under the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley. His company, Udemy, is on the second floor of a building in SoMa, in an open space occupied by multiple start-ups at once. Udemy is a classic platform design. Anyone can log on to the site and, using tools provided by the company, design an online course. If designers choose to sell their courses to students, Udemy keeps 30 percent of the revenues. Or, people can give the course away for free. Like Facebook or Instagram, the goal is to create a fun, elegant user experience, let other people create all of the content, and stand in the middle of information and financial exchange. The site is currently hosting hundreds of courses, including some designed by professors at Dartmouth, Vassar, Colgate, and Duke. But most of the designers don’t have PhDs. They’re just experts, and, as Bali notes, there are hundreds of thousands of experts all over the world. Most of them have never had a chance to offer higher education or reach a global audience of people who might need them— until now. W Perhaps Udemy’s democratic nature will give it a leg up in the coming war to build the dominant higher education platform. Maybe the three titans of Harvard, Berkeley, and MIT will propel edX to victory, or maybe the user experience expertise and facility with the economics of Silicon Valley will help Udacity carry the day. Coursera’s marriage of world-class brands with valley know-how seems like a formidable combination. Pearson, the British textbook giant, is working to build a platform of its own. There is a great deal of money and power at stake now. We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education. It will probably take a little while to digest. Cars and automobiles almost entirely killed the long-distance passenger train industry, for example, but railroads today carry more freight than ever, and it would be almost impossible to build automobiles if railroads did not exist to transport the raw materials. Similarly, TV did not replace radio, but merely diluted its influence. Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms. As the platform wars commence and huge online courses grow in prominence, most of the first adopters won’t be American students forgoing the opportunity to drink beer on weekends at State U. Instead, they’ll be students like Bali, among the hundreds of millions of people around the world with the talent and desire to learn but no State U to attend. The initial MOOC statistics bear this out—according to Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, more people from Lithuania signed up for his Stanford class than attend Stanford itself. Instead of trying to directly challenge American colleges—a daunting proposition, given the political power and public subsidies they possess—the new breed of tech start-ups will likely start by working in the unregulated private sector, where they’ll build what amounts to a parallel higher education universe. A few weeks after returning from the West Coast, I watched Eren Bali spend two hours in a Washington, D.C.–area conference room listening to government officials, regulators, and representatives of for-profit higher education corporations discuss Washington Monthly 43

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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