Hello gamedev.net members... I am new here, but I have been mulling over an idea for awhile now... This seemed like a great place to get some feedback and possible support.

A bit of background story -
I am the definition of that "group of people" that grew up with video games.I was born in 1985, and fell in love right off the bat when the NES was released in the USA. I own/owned every (US released) console NES through Ps3. I graduated high school, and went to a college to be a software engineer with a focus on game development... The college however, decided it was a good idea to steal cash from me (my tuition payments made via cash magically disappeared) I have been studying on my own after the 1st year of college and that whole ordeal... I have also been well aware of the fact that the education system in the USA is not really the greatest, even today.

I am a strong believer in the simple fact that knowledge, and art both should be spread as much as possible... for the sake of humanity itself.


To my point... How come there are not open source type higher-education programs? In my head, it would be a matter of finding enough same-minded individuals, who are also well educated.(in all reality, more educated than me) If I can find a good group of people to be that initial "root knowledge-base" The students of said root knowledge can be taught, then enter the industry. The neat thing is, knowledge itself is always expanding, and changing. The first batch of students will enter the industry, and continue to learn new things as they accomplish what they desire. Later on, they can return to the "school" to teach the next "batch." This creates a self sustaining knowledge-base that will constantly evolve and grow. Considering that college tuition is higher than ever, and still rising... I am sure that a few students today would elect to promise to return and teach rather than have college debts most their lives...
I am not a lawyer, but I feel the bureaucracy and legal side of things would be a big hurdle, along with financing. I know for a fact that it can be done, and may have solutions for said hurdles already...


I'd love to hear any thoughts/input on this concept

You'll likely be interested in http://www.khanacademy.org/

Moved to The Lounge.

IDK how you manage to overlook tons of free learning material in every shape or form out there. gamedev.net is an excellent domain specific resource, academic earth has great lessions, MIT has opencoursware, there are free programming books online, tutorails, expert blogs, stack-overflow ... how do you get more "open" than that ?
Sounds to me like you want someone to babysit you for free

I think that there are some things like you're describing, although perhaps not exactly. However, there are issues with being able to demonstrate your understanding from such a program, and inconsistency in the quality of the program.

If you get a degree from an accredited institution, that institution is required to teach specific things to students or lose the accredidation. If the institution gives you a degree, they are certifying that you have demonstrated to them that you understand what they've taught you. They basically stake their reputations on the performance of each student.

In the effort to suggest that their students are especially capable, schools try to hire excellent faculty and provide incentives to attract excellent students. This way schools maximize the the performance of each student they churn out, allowing them to get more money, encourage better students, and hire better teachers. The only reason that they can do this is that the schools themselves persist through time, and have a reputation to stake on students.

With a looser model, you start to lose a lot of this. You can't count on having a great teacher, for instance, because you're counting on whoever happened to have graduated recently. What if no one who chooses to teach in a given year is very good at teaching? Or not especially good at programming? Or both? Would the teachers be paid? The value of a certificate from such a program would vary from year to year, depending on what was taught and who taught it. Would you hire a programmer from an education program which gives you little to no idea of what skills or quality you're going to get? Maybe, but I think that I'd prefer an accredited degree.

Most of the stuff I'm talking about really refers to a formal program, which may not be what you mean. I think that there are a lot of interesting examples to look at, like this site. There are sub-forums for total beginners and much more advanced topics, where experts who work in the industry come to help people learn and improve for no compensation. There are also the periodic workshops that are closer to formal classes that get in-depth on specific topics, also run free of charge.

In the strictest sense of the word, I would interpret open-source education to mean that educational material is created in an open-source fashion, i.e. collaboratively in a shared version control repository. Given that, open-source concepts are applied to education in a limited way. In a roundabout way, Wikipedia is an example. edu.kde.org is another.

On the other hand, I don't believe there are any textbooks or class materials that could legitimately be called "open-source". I believe that this is for a number of reasons. Books in general, much like games, require a a cohesive vision of what their structure should be like, how they should flow, and so on. It is difficult to agree on these things. This is a bit ironic for me to say since I am involved in a free software game project, so it can be done, it's just that it is more problematic than in the type of project where open source really shines. Essentially, it really shines in areas where the only problems are of a purely technical nature, so that intelligent people typically agree on what needs to be done - and wen they don't, they can typically find a reasonable benchmark to settle the debate. This is why there are excellent open source compilers and OS kernels, but already in the area of GUIs, where taste starts to play a role, things get more difficult. How difficult do you think it is to create a textbook considering all the political wars that are fought over what should be in them? The whole debate where crazies want to put intelligent design into biology textbooks is just the tip of the iceberg.

Still, it is conceivable that the issue is simply a social one. Teachers do spend a significant amount of time developing lesson plans, homework problems, tests, you name it, and groups of like-minded teachers should, in theory, certainly be large enough that cooperation would pay off. Perhaps teachers are simply not very technical on average, and so it just never occurred to them to do this kind of cooperation? (This would be the cue for somebody who knows a teacher really well, perhaps as spouse, to ask them on their opinion on the topic; I'd be curious to hear it in any case.)

Finally, what you are really describing in your main paragraph is not something I would call open source:

To my point... How come there are not open source type higher-education programs? In my head, it would be a matter of finding enough same-minded individuals, who are also well educated.(in all reality, more educated than me) If I can find a good group of people to be that initial "root knowledge-base" The students of said root knowledge can be taught, then enter the industry. The neat thing is, knowledge itself is always expanding, and changing. The first batch of students will enter the industry, and continue to learn new things as they accomplish what they desire. Later on, they can return to the "school" to teach the next "batch." This creates a self sustaining knowledge-base that will constantly evolve and grow. Considering that college tuition is higher than ever, and still rising... I am sure that a few students today would elect to promise to return and teach rather than have college debts most their lives...
I am not a lawyer, but I feel the bureaucracy and legal side of things would be a big hurdle, along with financing. I know for a fact that it can be done, and may have solutions for said hurdles already...
[/quote]
You are describing exactly how the education system already works. Think about it. Students are taught by teachers / professors. Of those students, a small subset then goes on to become the new generation of teachers and professors, many of them after an intermediate stay outside of academia. Of course, many never leave academia; the ratio of those with intermediate industry experience greatly depends on which field you are talking about, and it seems to be that the distribution already follows reasonable patterns. In "pure" fields, most university professors never left academia. As you move towards increasingly applied fields, the ratio of university professors with industry experience increases. That makes a lot of sense.

As you so keenly predict, the bureaucracy and legal side of things can be a mess at times, along with financing, which brings us full circle.

So I guess my question back to you would be: What exactly do you feel separates your suggestion from the status quo?

Edit: Reading over what you wrote one more time, I also have to say this. Why would universities even want to have their alumni come back to teach? Being a good teacher is actually quite difficult, requires getting into the right mindset, preparing, and so on. As a student, why would I want to some random former student to teach my classes? Sure, sometimes a few words of wisdom from experience can be useful. But can you honestly imagine let's say an introductory course on algorithm to be taught in a good way by some random alumni? I can't.

This is pretty stupid. There aleady tons of open source learning materials out there most known probably being the MIT open courseware (but there are tons of other colleges that do similar). They give lectures, assignments that you can do, etc. And lets not forget sites like khanacademy.

If you're saying that you want open, free courses where you'll get a degree at the end...well that's never going to happen.

The college however, decided it was a good idea to steal cash from me (my tuition payments made via cash magically disappeared)[/quote]

You should keep reciepts for cash payments. Or maybe you didn't get one to begin with... O_o

Am I the only one who is annoyed at the inflationary use of the term "open source" in this context? Those MIT course materials - while probably informative pointers for the OP - are not open source.