When author and marketing expert Seth Godin speaks at conferences there’s always a packed house.

When he posts articles to his blog every day, 44,000 people around the world stop what they are doing to read Seth’s Blog. It’s ranked in the top 150 blogs and the #1 marketing blog in the world. Seth also started last year a new 6 month MBA program.

Earlier this month (August 2009) he wrote the following article entitled ‘Education at the Crossroads’. The prophetic nature of it got me thinking about ‘Theological Education at the Crossroads.

Actually, there isn’t one, there are three choices that anyone offering higher education is going to have to make.

Should this be scarce or abundant?
MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes available for free online. The marginal cost of this is pretty close to zero, so it’s easy for them to share. Abundant education is easy to access and offers motivated individuals a chance to learn.

Scarcity comes from things like accreditation, admissions policies or small classrooms.

Should this be free or expensive?
Wikipedia offers the world’s fact base to everyone, for free. So it spreads.

On the other hand, some bar review courses are so expensive the websites don’t even have the guts to list the price.

The newly easy access to the education marketplace (you used to need a big campus and a spot in the guidance office) means that both the free and expensive options are going to be experimented with, because the number of people in the education business is going to explode (then implode).

If you think the fallout in the newspaper business was dramatic, wait until you see what happens to education.

Should this be about school or about learning?
School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.

For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.

The combinations…
Imagine a school that’s built around free, abundant learning. And compare it to one that’s focused on scarce, expensive schooling. Or dream up your own combination. My recent MBA program, for example, was scarce (only 9 people got to do it) and it was free and focused on learning.

Just because something is free doesn’t meant there isn’t money to be made. Someone could charge, for example, for custom curricula, or focused tutoring, or for a certified (scarce) degree. When a million people are taking your course, you only need 1% to pay you to be happy indeed.

Eight combinations of the three choices are available and my guess is that all eight will be tried. If I were going to wager, I’d say that the free, abundant learning combination is the one that’s going to change the world.

Link
Seth Godin, Education at the Crossroads, Seth Godin’s Blog, August 2009.

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Related
Seth Godin Tells Teachers: Quit Textbooks and Publish Free Online, Seth’s Blog, 14 June 2009.

For First Time Readers of TWB or a Refresher
A general introduction to Theologians Without Borders is offered in several languages at these links:
Theologians Without Borders
Teólogos Sin Fronteras
Théologiens Sans Frontières
Theologen Ohne Grenzen
Ahli Teologi Tanpa Sempadan
Ang mga Dalubhasa sa Salita ng Diyos na Walang Hangganan
Teólogos Sem Fronteiras
Teologi Senza Frontiere

If you can translate this statement into your language I would be keen to add it to this list.

Interested in Serving With TWB?
A good place to start (without making a commitment) is to adapt this Expression of Interest and send your information with a digital photo to me.

Dr Geoff Pound
Coordinator, Theologians Without Borders

Contact me on email at geoffpound[at]gmail.com or on Facebook or Twitter.

Image: Seth Godin.