Paid Versus Free Educational Material
I wanted to take a moment to share my views on paid versus free education as this has been a topic on my heart for a long time…education is in the core of things I think about on a daily basis.
Give Away Everything FREE?
My view has come full circle on paid versus free education. At one time I thought my knowledge online shouldn’t be monetized, and in a sense that is mostly still true…example is my blog is still ad-free. Even so, about a year ago I started dabbling with different forms of paid education. This paid-slant stemmed from the fact that education started overtaking my life and most of my time was spent developing educational material and events instead of actually doing paid work.
Curiosity or Career?
There is a difference in someone who is just trying to learn how to use jQuery or an open source project and someone who is obviously using that material for direct monetary gain.
I can see the “thank you”s coming from people who learned from me carry a different tone as the thank you’s coming from people who explain to me how the knowledge changed their career…teaching people to fish for themselves. If I knew what to look for years ago I could have seen this divide long ago.
Wasting or Making Money
So let me explain with an example of this in action in my own learning adventures… I bought peepcode’s node.js screencast and after I watched it I actually didn’t feel that good about it because I was just trying to explore node.js and there was no direct financial gain involved with buying the screencast (not like others I’ve bought in the past). I was just..curious about node.js so it was a waste of money. However there has been other times when I really needed to learn a topic and I stood to benefit financially from the knowledge so I actually felt better about buying it than when I learned it for free from some blog.
Eureka! A Plausible Philosophy
As a result of years of experience, research and field testing, here is the line that I am drawing on a philosophical level and you will likely see this playing out in my decisions to produce educational content in the future. It is the same philosophy I carry with me towards open source and software I build.
If something is generic and more than likely doesn’t solve a specific problem that is directly used for monetization purposes, then that educational content should remain free and that knowledge belongs in the public domain. However, if I produce something that someone would arrive to if they are looking to profit or take the next step in their career or business, then it becomes responsible to monetize access to that material while pricing based on the likely return on their investment (1/10th rule of thumb).
There is still a somewhat fuzzy line there, open to personal judgment, but it at least clarifies and somewhat delineates things on a philosophical level. Someone who is building something big should probably pay for the knowledge necessary to create the blue prints.
Retaining Trust
I think with this new-found philosophy I stand a much better chance at meeting both my career goals and also helping build the community further without losing trust of the people that rely on me as a source of good information.
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4 comments
Very interesting post. I find myself asking similar questions. Recently I have started putting in considerable effort to building a DIY Computer Science learning application and website.
The app is going to be open source and the website will be free for students. I am however trying to explore ways to monetize the website through affiliate links and other web means.
I guess my philosophy in this has been, the website should be free, so anyone who is economically disadvantaged, will not have to worry about paying for the learning, and I can also justify spending my time on it by generating revenues from the website.
Always nice to read thoughts on education.
Interesting post, as i also thought a lot about software, knowledge, teaching and so on.
The problem is that much of my knowledge comes from projects which i had grown with. So i was looking for the most solutions, tutorials etc when i need to solve a specific problem.
Another possibility in my eyes is to give back some know-how (or software or anything else) to the community, to help others come to their solution.
Great questions. I have 3 thoughts:
(1) Where does the desire to give away education come from? If there was a local plumber giving away their plumbing services, I’d want to know why? How does he support himself? etc..
(2) As a student, I’d rather pay for good teaching (even if it is just for personal enlightenment) than to swim through the ocean of mediocre tutorials and “how-tos.”
(3)Distinguishing content that has a financial return vs content that is merely for personal edification seems impossible. I might learn something just for myself, then three months later sell that knowledge/service to some client.
(4) While reading your post I was thinking of Radiohead’s “Pay-What-You_want” album – which was supposed to revolutionize the music industry. Well, they shut it down on December 6, 2007 and reverted to the traditional “Pay-what-we-tell-you” method.
(5) Finally, more than FREE, I want VALUE (quality). I want quality – above all else. I want quality so badly that I do not mind paying money for it.
The best compromise I have seen on this issue is M Hartl’s free tutorial at railstutorial.org. He gives the written tutorial for free online. But, you can also pay for the screencasts where he walks you through the tutorials. It’s expensive, but brilliant and, in my mind, cheaper than many of the free garbage that I have waded through.
Thanks for the post.
I seem to have gone full circle a few dozen times on this issue.
If I distance myself from reality a bit and for one second, escape the capitalist mindsight of money making for personal gain, I think it’s easy enough to conclude that all education should be freely given, for education, generic and specialised, is the only means via which humanity continues to progress. Why would we, humanity, want to create a barrier (i.e. money) to our only means of progression?
Back to reality. I remember being a member of Lynda.com which sells some very decent but also some horrific screencast-tutorials. All of their Photoshop series are pretty awesome, one in particular taught me almost everything I know about PS. I was curious though, having a background in JavaScript and now being quite proficient, what would Lynda.com’s programming tutorials be like, specifically their JS ones? Well, I was utterly disappointed. Bad practices, inefficient code, half-assed explanations, no mention of the ECMA spec, etc…
So, it seems that the lure of money itself is not enough to drive the production of really good educational content. I have found that much of what I consider really good information, whether it be generic or specific has been shared for free, probably motivated by a drive to improve a community’s understanding of something. You know those rants you see? Like when a programming guru blogs about some bad practice or something he/she has seen recently? Well, those blog posts are awesome! They may be driven by something less sincere than a desire to improve a community’s understanding, such as ego, but at the end of the day, the content is free and great.
I’d rather wade through the rubbish to find the gems than pander to content specifically designed to maximise profits.
I can learn more from StackOverflow in one hour than two months in the CS degree I dropped out of.