Franken-Food, E-Learning, and the Hungry Disenfranchised Millions

President Bush recently added an additional dimension to the Genetically Modified Food (GMF) conflict currently underway between the US and the EU. In my previous post, characterizing GMF treatment in a WTO dispute as a preview of e-learning treatment under the GATS, I focused on nations losing the ability to enforce their own standards. I missed the other way of looking at it.

NEW LONDON, Conn.--President Bush accused Europe on Wednesday of aggravating hunger in Africa with restrictive trade policies on genetically modified food.

President Bush, not known prior to this time as a strong supporter of third world food relief efforts, is ready to seriously address humanity's long standing famine problem -- and "unfounded, unscientific fears" are the only obstacles in his path.

It will be the same with Franken-Learning. Professional educators will be skeptical. A mass producible, wearable personal control system that accelerates certain types of learning? In the name of the digitally disenfranchised it must be disseminated. So, we'll just be implanting this little chip right about here, and then ...

Sneaky Commercial Software

Timothy Berners-Lee, who created the protocol that enabled the web to develop, is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, an international association that helps determine how the web will continue to develop. That's reassuring to me.

That's also why it was a little strange to see a new W3C Patent Policy which opens the door for patents. Timothy Berners-Lee is a well-known opponent of commercial barriers to the free exchange of ideas on the web. But he is also in favor of certain categories of free market competition among for-profit entities and believes that there is a healthy role for commercialization in the evolution of the web. What he and the W3C are saying, if I understand it correctly, is that methods and procedures built into the standards that define the web infrastructure should not contain any patented elements. However, patented applications and content which exist on top of the web infrastructure are acceptable, perhaps even encouraged.

I'm not sure the distinction between applications and infrastructure can be defined as clearly as the W3C policy suggests, but who am I to question Timothy Berners-Lee on a matter like this? I mean, it can't be like no one ever thought of it before. The inseparability of aps and ops was a key element of the Microsoft case, maybe the key element. Stephen Downes is dubious: Call me a sceptic: I still don't think the proposal is strong enough, and I think we will see the day when some company manages to sneak a royalty-bearing patent through the W3C standards process. To the detriment of us all.

I don't know much about the W3C standards process and how easy it may be to sneak a money patent through it. But I do know that in e-learning, some applications function like a platform and a set of standards. It's easy to point out how unhip and un-cutting-edge big applications like WebCT or Blackboard are. The fact is, universities are now investing major bucks in making them an inseparable part of their overall infrastructure. Commercial products with rapidly expanding licensing fees.

In a sense, these two particular products did sneak through the normal standards process. If they had entered the marketplace as Enterprise E-Learning systems, universities would have studied this new phenomenon for decades before moving decisively. So instead they entered the marketplace as innocuous little applications with price tags under $5K. Thousands of institutions purchased the low-cost annual licenses without thinking too much about it. Thousands more faculty members started making their first extremely primitive electronic learning objects, and assembled them into the first online embodiments of university courses. The point is, they made them in the WebCT or the Blackboard environment, observing their standards. Not that the work couldn't be ported by brute force, but increasingly that has become unrealistic -- because So Many courses have been made.

Faculty, underpaid graduate students, and some instructional designers leveraged the commercial software companies into enterprise status at universities all over the world. In return, the enterprise is paying a good deal more for the privilege. I suppose if the universities receive good value for the expenditure, that'll be that. If they do not, the door will be open for an Open Source alternative, if one is sufficiently developed and widely supported. And people will start talking about getting commercial software out of the e-learning infrastructure. It would have been so much simpler to have started with Open Source in the first place, but it will never happen that way.

Franken-Food and E-Learning

The latest WTO scuffle over genetically modified food (GMF) could be replaying itself almost word for word at some point as an e-learning standards dispute. The GMF case is an excellent opportunity to view WTO mechanisms in action.

The Context: We are near the end of a 5-year moratorium imposed on GMF imports by the European Union (EU). The EU shows no strong indication of wanting to lift the moratorium. The United States and several co-filers will lodge a formal complaint against the EU, instigating a WTO investigation. It will be an 18-month process, undertaken and decided by unelected officials, and its decision will be binding. No matter how people in Europe may or may not feel about Franken-Food.

Here's the interesting point on which the decision will hinge:

Under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary rules of the World Trade Organisation, a state can ban the import of goods if it has scientific evidence that they are harmful. The EU has not even suggested it has such evidence.

That reads an awful lot like "It's OK to do it unless you prove it's harmful"

Switch to e-learning.

A nation or a group of nations might wish to regulate delivery methods at various levels of education. Some heavily promoted educational services may not be based on the right teaching models for a given culture. Or at the very least -- the teaching models warrant further research before they are allowed into the marketplace. Which is how the EU is attempting to proceed with GMF.

But the time is up and they couldn't do the impossible -- they couldn't prove GMF is bad for you. What is bad for you is so complex that statistical correlations rather than smoking guns are the best that can be expected, and that only after decades of expensive work. The anti-smoking research effort is a demonstration.

Thus, the pro-WMF side can make statements like this one, from US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick:

"The EU's persistent resistance to abiding by its WTO obligations has perpetuated a trade barrier unwarranted by the EC's own scientific analysis, which impedes the global use of a technology that could be of great benefit to farmers and consumers around the world."

Proving that a given form of e-learning is bad for learners will be even harder than proving cigarettes cause cancer. Forget it. It can't be done within the framework of experimental research. This means that anything goes. Ultimately, nations will not be able to restrict the e-learning formats offered to its citizens under the terms of the WTO.

Ah, but under the GATS, committing service sectors is voluntary. So far, about 40 nations have thrown higher education into the GATS pool; education in general is an under-subscribed service in GATS World.

Ah, but the GATS is also inexorable. There will always be more rounds and there is an explicit commitment to open more sectors during every round.

I predict that within 5 years, anyone will be able to obtain a complete, self-contained undergraduate degree program on a single unit of media. Every course will be there, available in sequence based on passing pre-requisites. The content will be included, as will self-review quizzes and examinations on which university credit is based. These assessments will be self-scoring and auto-reporting with an Internet connection.

How will the EU feel about that, assuming they don't invent the first Degree-on-a-Disk? Will that be Franken-Learning?

Red Tape or Quality Assurance?

India has taken over from China as the country sending the largest number of foreign students to U.S. institutions of higher education, according to the Open Doors Report released in November, 2002 by the Institute of International Education. Almost 67,000 Indian students were enrolled in the academic year 2001-02, primarily in graduate programs focusing on management and information technology.

Why is this the case? It's the same pattern we have spoken of already as the driving force behind Transnational Ed. Here is how Rajesh Arya, President of the Council for American Education in India, explains the situation: "[It is] very difficult to get admission to good Indian universities," said Arya. "Over the past two decades, the number of students have increased tremendously but the number of [places] in Indian universities has not increased."

But this is somewhat old news. Why bring it up now? Because no matter how many students from India travel abroad to study, there are still plenty more left at home, which in the eyes of Transnational Ed providers represents an extremely attractive market. In the 1990s, private providers began moving rapidly to take advantage of this market, and many of them were non-accredited. The marketing campaigns were powerful, however, and some students registered only to find later that their expensive, newly minted qualifications did not gain them entry to the job market in the way they had foreseen since the courses were unrecognized and the institutions unaccredited.

Recently, The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has stepped into the breech with a wide-ranging set of new regulations and an overall stance that no foreign tertiary institution offering technical education will be able to operate in India without its approval. By way of clarification, "technical education" in India covers such areas as Engineering and Technology, Computer Applications, Architecture & Town Planning, Pharmacy, Management, Hotel Management & Catering Technology, Applied Arts & Crafts etc.

Professional educators see these regulations as a much-needed defense against non-accredited universities. However, beyond the "watchdog" role the AICTE has set itself up to play, there is some concern that the regulations may go too far. In fact, new rules clearly state that, "The fee to be charged and the intake in each course to be offered by a foreign university / institution leading to a degree or diploma shall be as prescribed by the AICTE, giving due hearing to the concerned foreign university / institution."

Regulating fees and intake standards is a much more serious intervention in the market than merely safeguarding students against non-accredited programs. As a result, the AICTE regulations are virtually certain to be challenged in WTO forums as unnecessarily restrictive. How far can a national government or government body go in protecting its citizens? This remains to be seen, but it is a good bet that by going beyond a mere insistence on accreditation, the entire set of regulations will be jeopardized in some future WTO action.