I was writing about openness in education in a chapter I am struggling with today, and had just read Tony Bates's comments on iQualify, an awful cloud rental service offering a monolithic locked-in throwback that just makes me exclaim, in horror, 'Oh good grief! Seriously?' And it got me thinking.

Learning management systems, as implemented in academia, are basically paywalls. You don't get in unless you pay your fees. So why not pick up on what publishers infamously already do and allow people to pay per use? In a self-paced model like that used at Athabasca it makes perfect sense and most of the infrastructure - role-based time-based access etc - and of course the content already exists. Not every student needs 6 months of access or the trimmings of a whole course but, especially for those taking a challenge route (just the assessment), it would often be useful to have access to a course for a little while in order to get a sense of what the expectations might be, the scope of the content, and the norms and standards employed. On occasion, it might even be a good idea to interact with others. Perhaps we could sell daily, weekly or monthly passes. Or we could maybe do it at a finer level of granularity too/instead: a different pass for different topics, or different components like forums, quizzes or assignment marking. Together, following from the publishers' lead, such passes might cost 10 or 20 times the total cost of simply subscribing to a whole course if every option were purchased, but students could strategically pick the parts they actually need, so reducing their own overall costs.

This idea is, of course, stupid. This is not because it doesn't make economic and practical sense: it totally does, notwithstanding the management, technical and administrative complexity it entails. It is stupid because it flips education on its head. It makes chunks of learning into profit centres rather than the stuff of life. It makes education into a product rather than celebrating its role as an agent of personal and societal growth. It reduces the rich, intricately interwoven fabric of the educational experience to a set of instrumentally-driven isolated events and activities. It draws attention to accreditation as the be-all and end-all of the process. It is aggressively antisocial, purpose-built to reduce the chances of forming a vibrant learning community. This is beginning to sound eerily familiar. Is that not exactly what, in too high a percentage of our courses, we are doing already?

If we and other universities are to survive and thrive, the solution is not to treat courses and accreditation as products or services. The ongoing value of a university is to catalyze the production and preservation of knowledge: that is what we are here for, that is what makes us worthwhile having. Courses are just tools that support that process, though they are far from the only ones, while accreditation is not even that: it's just a byproduct, effluent from the educational process that happens to have some practical societal value (albeit at enormous cost to learning). In physical universities there are vast numbers of alternatives that support the richer purpose of creating and sustaining knowledge: cafes, quads, hallways, common rooms, societies, clubs, open lectures, libraries, smoking areas, student accommodation, sports centres, theatres, workshops, studios, research labs and so on. Everywhere you go you are confronted with learning opportunities and people to learn with and from, and the taught courses are just part of the mix, often only a small part. At least, that is true in a slightly idealized world - sadly, the vast majority of physical universities are as stupidly focused on the tools as we are, so those benefits are an afterthought rather than the main thing to celebrate, and are often the first things to suffer when cuts come along. Online, such beyond-the-course opportunities are few and far between: the Landing is (of course) built with exactly that concern in mind, but there's precious little sign of it anywhere else at AU, one of the most advanced online universities in the world.  The nearest thing most students get to it is the odd Facebook group or Twitter interaction, which seems an awful waste to me, though a fascinating phenomenon that blurs the lines between the institution and the broader community.

It is already possible to take a high quality course for free in almost any subject that interests you and, more damagingly, any time now there will soon be sources of accreditation that are as prestigious as those awarded by universities but orders of magnitude cheaper, not to mention compellingly cut-price  options from universities that can leverage their size and economies of scale (and, perhaps, cheap labour) to out-price the rest of us. Competing on these grounds makes no sense for a publicly funded institution the role of which is not to be an accreditation mill but to preserve, critique, observe, transform and support society as a whole. We need to celebrate and cultivate the iceberg, not just its visible tip. Our true value is not in our courses but in our people (staff and students) and the learning community that they create.