Education 2.0 & 3.0

I said it was going to be fun looking at the costs of digital media in education, but it wasn’t. When I came to write this section, I thought it would be a breeze. I wrote about this topic as recently as 2005. All I needed to do is tweak it a little to bring it up to date, I thought.

However, there has truly been a revolution in the media available for teaching and learning in the last ten years, and this revolution has completely up-ended many of the assumptions about costs previously made in this field. Most of the research on costs of educational media had been done by people (like myself) working mainly in distance education, because that was where technology was being mainly used for teaching. That has all changed now: media have gone mainstream.

What is really interesting though is how little research there has been done on the costs of new digital media in education (MOOCs are a slight exception). Nevertheless, when I dug into the topic, I came to what struck me at first as an astonishing conclusion: the costs of media don’t matter any more in media selection. Use what suits best your educational purpose, because it’s all low cost now.

Of course, that is a gross over-simplification. Like many other topics in this area, straight comparisons between different media don’t work. What you have to look at are the conditions or factors that influence costs, across all media. That’s what I’ve tried to explore in this section.