A few weeks ago, Harvard University and MIT announced a new joint venture called edX, an experiment in online learning that promises to throw open the gates of these elite institutions and make world-class educational content available — for free — to anyone who wants it.

According to the Harvard Gazette, these courses will be comprised of video segments, quizzes, question and answer sessions driven by student feedback, online laboratories, and student paced learning. edX students won’t walk away with a Harvard or MIT diploma, but they will be eligible to earn a “certificate of mastery” at the end of the coursework.

The Harvard/MIT venture comes at a moment of explosive growth in online learning, which has been popularized by for-profit entities like the University of Phoenix. Other schools are charging for their online offerings. So why would Harvard and MIT simply give away their content?

The answer lies in the word “experiment.” As hundreds of thousands of students from around the world log into these free courses, edX will be collecting precious data on how students learn in the new environment, with an eye to a future where schedule and location are no longer constraints on education.

High-tech experiments in distance learning are not new. In the mid 1990s, working with a subsidiary of the Sylvan Learning Corporation in Baltimore, I participated in an attempt to translate the intense atmosphere of a classroom at the Wharton School of Business into a new, high-tech realm. This was part of Wharton’s drive to expand its “brand” beyond the bricks and mortar limitations of the campus in Philadelphia.

The new product was called “Wharton Direct,” a combination of live satellite broadcasts; computer interactions; and teleconferences. There was an Internet component, but the Internet was in its early days, and bandwidth was a severe limitation. Wharton Direct students gathered in specially outfitted classrooms in their home cities. The professor’s lecture was beamed, live, to a big TV in the front of the room. Each student had a desktop computer; the professor pushed Powerpoint slides to students’ desktops as he lectured. Impromptu teleconferences gave the professor the power to “drop in” on a classroom and single out a hapless student for interrogation. The teleconferences were simultaneously broadcast to all the classrooms, which gave every student the pleasure of watching a distant classmate squirm.

Our brief was to replicate, as closely as possible, the dynamics of a Wharton classroom. My job was to work with each professor to adapt his course material to this strange new environment.

Setting aside the challenges of coordinating all of the technologies, which were legion, this new model of “distributed learning” raised serious questions. What would be lost in translation? How important was it to be in the classroom with the professor? What were the intangibles, the elements that separated a Wharton classroom from every other classroom?

Some of the professors were stubborn. They’d spent a lifetime perfecting their courses; why change now? But others — the experts in business management in particular — saw interesting possibilities in the new media, and took up the challenge with gusto.

Our broadcasts were a lot like the early days of television — everything was live, and lots of things went wrong.

But a lot went right, too. For instance, if a student needed clarification on a point the professor had just made, the high-tech environment made it possible to send an email to a teaching assistant and get back an immediate response. And the impromptu teleconferences seemed to keep everyone — including the professors — on their toes.

It was a valiant effort, but in the end, the technology simply wasn’t ripe. The courses were expensive, and the intangibles of the Wharton campus were more important than anyone had realized. Actually attending Wharton — as opposed to attending virtually — had significant cachet. The Wharton Direct experiment was shut down.

In my opinion, the problem went beyond the limits of the technology. Elite schools like Wharton, and for that matter, Harvard and MIT, still use the Socratic method in many classrooms. While it may not always look like the ferocious exchanges between professor and student in the movie The Paper Chase, which was set at Harvard Law School, there’s nevertheless an extremely important dialectic at work: the constant testing of a student’s assumptions.

Socrates was famous for saying “I know that I know nothing,” and, in fact, his dialogues, as recorded by Plato, are more about erasing false assumptions than about constructing new definitions. Getting rid of “what you think you know, but just ain’t so” is a lot harder than simply learning new content. It requires active intervention. Some of those interventions can be uncomfortable, but discomfort is often the price — and the sign — of true learning.

This is a great age for the free dissemination of information. Harvard and MIT should be lauded for this new experiment in the democratization of knowledge. Great things will surely come of it.

But let’s not forget that there’s a vast difference between the distribution of content — even excellent content — and a rigorous education.

As Charles Kingsfield, the tyrannic law professor in The Paper Chase put it, “You’ll teach yourselves the law, but I will train your mind!”

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 24 May 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com