HIGHER EDUCATION FOR SALE
	Higher education is slowly being drawn into the world of the market. Should we be frightened or excited by this evolution? Focus, a four-page report, looks behind the arguments in this very controversial debate.

Edito - The hue and cry about the ‘McDonaldization’ of education should make us reach for our critical faculties. First, despite their ubiquity, McDonald’s restaurants account for only a tiny proportion of the food that people eat. Second, McDonald’s is successful because people like their food. Third, their secret is to offer a limited range of dishes as commodities that have the same look, taste and quality everywhere.

Commoditization. It’s an ugly word that my spellchecker rejects. But it is a key process for bringing prosperity to ordinary people by giving them greater freedom and wider choice. Products that were once hand crafted and expensive become standardized, mass produced and inexpensive. Personal computers and cellular telephones used to be specialized items for the elite. Today they are mass-market consumer items.

When products become commodities there is fierce price competition between manufacturers and profit margins are squeezed. Producers hate this and industries often have to restructure, but consumers benefit greatly.

What are the implications for education? Is the commoditization of learning material a way to bring education to all? Yes it is, and open universities in a number of countries have shown the way. By developing courseware for large numbers of students they can justify the investment required to produce high quality learning materials at low unit cost.
Such materials can be used successfully outside their country of origin after local adaptation and translation. Commoditizing education need not mean commercializing education. The educational community should adopt the model of the open source software movement. We can imagine a future in which teachers and institutions make their courseware and learning materials freely available on the web. Anyone else can translate and adapt them for local use provided they make their new version freely available too.

In this way, teachers all over the world can be freed from the chore of reinventing the wheel of basic content. They can then concentrate on adapting the best material, helping students to study it and assessing their competence and knowledge. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown the way by making its own web materials available free. Let’s hope this heralds a worldwide movement to commoditize education for the common good.

John Daniel
Assistant Director-General for Education