There is little fault to find in Richard Baraniuk’s model of open source education; it is a fleshed out and practical model that I believe will take education in a positive direction. Perhaps the only place where Baraniuk and I disagree is that he seems to think of open source education as a revolutionary new model, while I see it as the natural evolution of our current model.

Baraniuk begins his explanation of the model by having the audience perform a thought experiment in which the free the pages of books from their bindings and transform them into a digital format. He then uses Legos as an analogy for creating customized learning plans from the countless pieces of information that are now available to work with. However, this is not fundamentally different from what we do today, or have done before the internet.

Let us ask, “What is a textbook?” Obviously it is a collection of information centered on a given subject, but where does that information come from? Most textbooks that I am familiar with derive their information from the most widely accepted literature in the field. Essentially, the author has analyzed the information in the field, put it together, and organized it in a way that will help a reader develop a coherent understanding of a topic. Furthermore, university professors add a level of customization on top of this by changing the order in which we read chapters, adding additional reading, and suggesting pairings between texts. I have even seen course packets that contain physical scans of selected readings in one inexpensive binding, which is exactly what Baraniuk describes as the end product.

However, what this new model offers us is a digital infrastructure that facilitates what we are doing to such a degree that we can very well expect a qualitative improvement in education. The Creative Commons license gives us unambiguous sharing privileges, and digitizing our information gives us ease of access and navigation that cannot be matched by a physical library. Furthermore, Baraniuk points out that this will allow us to make connections between seemingly unrelated fields; our current model can do this as well with things as simple as text pairing, but this new model will allow text pairing to occur at a scale that the financial constraints of physical media don’t quite allow.

So, there is no reason to be apprehensive about open source education because it does not overthrow the current textbook regime. It merely pushes the limitations of what our system can do off to a distant horizon.