The Future of Education: what will open, three-dimensional learning look like?

Beth Harris, Ph.D.Director of Digital LearningThe Museum of Modern Art

Steven Zucker, Ph.D.Dean of Graduate StudiesFashion Institute of Technology/SUNY

Think our future will require better schools? —you're wrong.  The future calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments. Think we will need better teachers? —wrong again.  Tomorrow’s learners will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles.

The pressures on education now

If you can see lectures for free, why attend a university?

If you can get high-quality learning material free on the web,do you still buy $200 textbooks?

If you can publish for free, you can teach someone else

OER Commons lists 16,226 post-secondary resources

Curriki—a community of nearly 100,000 educators, learners and experts collectively developing free curricular resources.

You pick your school, major, professors, and courses But what if you could......study with faculty in London, New York, and Shanghai...learn in a real and/or a virtual world...learn outside of formal "courses" and still get a degree...create your own composite major

What happens when universities no longer have a monopoly on knowledge or its transmission?

Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings, 1968

In time,    customized learning paths are institutionally accredited  

Informal learning becomes increasingly important 

Universities, museums and libraries become integrated networks less concerned with institutional identity and more concerned with collaboration 

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