Much of the conversation around the new wave of online education startups has focused on what they mean for the incumbent institutions, from for-profit online universities to the traditional Ivy League. But what about what they mean for learners? Who is currently succeeding in open learning contexts? What are the missing pieces of the ecosystem — from discovery, to peer support, to mentoring, to assessment — that will allow the most severely underserved learners to succeed in this new learning environment?

Tuesday, June 19, 12:30 pm
Classroom 1010, Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School
This event is at capacity; the talk will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

The selection of free online higher learning experiences--as distinguished from merely raw learning materials, like MIT's Open Courseware --- has expanded greatly in the past six months. Udemy, Coursera, the Minerva Project, Udacity, and edx all offer courses created by faculty at top universities in the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) format, each with some combination of video lectures, exercises, a social component (chat rooms, wikis, Facebook groups) and even a form of certification for your learning. And many of them are offering these courses for free. Much of the conversation around this new wave of education startups has focused on what they mean for the incumbent institutions, from for-profit online universities to the traditional Ivy League. But what about what they mean for learners? Who is currently succeeding in open learning contexts? What are the missing pieces of the ecosystem--from discovery, to peer support, to mentoring, to assessment--that will allow the most severely underserved learners to succeed in this new learning environment?

Anya Kamenetz talks about how innovations are enabling personal learning networks that augment — or trump — traditional learning. Thank you to Definition 6 for providing in-kind video editing services for TEDxAtlanta.

Fast Company writer and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and The Coming Transformation of Higher Education Anya Kamenetz is available exclusively thro...

MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."

From the Sustainable Brands Conference in Monterey, CA on June 8, 2010.

Anya Kamenetz (born September 15, 1980 in Baltimore) is an American writer living in Brooklyn, New York City. She is a staff writer for Fast Company magazine and a columnist for Tribune Media . During 2005 she wrote a column for The Village Voice called "Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young". Her first book, Generation Debt, was published by Riverhead Books in February 2006. Her writing has also appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, The Nation, the The Forward newspaper, and Vegetarian Times.

In 2009 Kamenetz wrote a column called "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education"[1] and in 2010 a book on the subject titled DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. In 2010 she was named a Game Changer in Education by the Huffington Post.