MOOC anyone?

Progression in education. And mostly free.

Supply may actually meet up with demand. Qualified intelligence may soon be rewarded with certifiable (in a good way) individuals flooding fields with exponential growth and limitless marketability. Design this. Analyze that. Simulate those. Program these.

Students are tired of sitting through the mandatory classes on ancient civilizations and mundane orations on classical writing. Some just want to play ball. Others want to program and design. Some are better suited to solve logarithmic abnormalities and facilitate diverse system integrations. Not everyone needs the college experience. What they do need is the certification.

Apprentices used to spend years honing a skill before they could work in an industry as a respected craftsman. Not much has changed in the past 1000 years. It probably won’t. Licensure, certification, accreditation and graduation are all synonymous with validation.

No amateur can land a job in any competitive field without references and experience. Colleges and universities have long been the preferred method to indicate such qualifications, so does it have to take 4 years?

The inter-webs have been expanding their reach the past several years. Now the web spins in more directions than ever imagined, unless your name is Merlin or Jobs, and will probably continue to do so. From a desk right into the palm of your hand, accessibility has never been so prevalent. Archaic traditions are being broken down, and new high-speed interactive relationships are developing where they never could have before.

Our education system must keep up. Value may still come at a cost. Small but efficient start-ups are enrolling thousands of students a month. People are doing what they’ve always done, paying for an education, but it’s not to some state or private college. If T. Rowe, Franklin Covey and others accept this new non-traditional form of education, we may have a small-educational revolution approaching.

Harvard, Stanford and many other renowned institutions of higher learning have begun offering high-demand classes online, to everyone. You no longer have to send in an application, pick up and move across the country or rack up insurmountable debt to get a world-class education. You just have to log on.

Thousands and thousands of new students are added to classes that are essential for continual economic growth and stabilization of competitive world markets. People want to learn, and we must not be blind to the idea that many of the older, more fundamental ways of providing the valuable commodity of knowledge can be served up on a better platter and be healthier for everyone.