Netflix and education

  by reflexer

Can parallels be drawn between the development of television, from scheduled broadcasting to on-demand streaming, and the movement in education from traditional campus-based studies to unbundled online courses including MOOCs? Donald Clark raises this question in a post, What does ‘learning’ have to learn from Netflix?

Netflix is in 50 countries and will go into 200 within two years. We badly need some big, global education content delivery. Brilliant, scalable content that teachers and learners love. MOOCs are getting there, showing what can be done but still far too long and over-scheduled (semester-long courses were never the real demand, just a feature of the old, supply model). We need subscriptions in the tens then hundreds of millions (Netflix has 57 million but growing exponentially). Education needs a Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter or Netflix. I’m tired of the corner-shop mentality, the attitude that teaching and learning has nothing ‘essential’ that can’t be scaled.

"Television is dead, long live television" sums up the situation rather well. Many people today have almost abandoned scheduled broadcast TV for streaming services like Netflix where content is available on-demand and on any device. Netflix, like many other successful services, uses customer data to adapt delivery to suit individual preferences and offer an increasingly personalised product. The analogy is that the same algorithm-based technology could be successfully implemented to deliver personalised educational content, as promised by the field of learning analytics. Clark sees this as a wake-up call to higher education to start fully exploiting the opportunities offered by technology.

Some kind of educational Netflix is not completely new. Apples iTunes U could be seen as a prototype still in development, offering almost a million lectures from thousands of universities on demand and on most devices. Add learning analytics, which I suspect Apple are already working on, and you get just that kind of customised service that offers new bite-sized modules related to what you're studying. I'm sure that the delivery of educational content will move strongly in the direction described by Clark but it is still a broadcast model, no matter how personalised and on-demand it may seem to be. Who produces this content and what view of the world do they wish their content to reflect? Which content can we trust and how can we ensure that the material reflects global and multi-cultural perspectives. The risk is that this market is cornered by dominant western corporations.

Delivering content at scale and adapting it to personal preferences is the easy part really. It's what you do with that content that leads to learning. You can consume tons of content without necessarily becoming much wiser. You need to be able to put it all into context and draw conclusions and this generally needs guidance and a community to discuss with. You also need someone to break the personalisation bubble and force you to watch or read something that conflicts with your own views. The problem with personalised services like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Google is they want to keep you happy rather than challenging you. The adaptive Netflix model of content delivery is on its way I'm sure but even if it's an exciting development I'm not sure it really contributes to education. It's still completely top-down and controlled by a big corporation.

The danger for me is that this content is still locked down by copyright. It would be far more valuable to education if all this content is openly licensed and can then be adapted, translated and remixed by local educators to be more relevant to local learners. What we really need is a dynamic, global educational cloud where content is constantly being created, adapted and shared and is available anywhere and on any device.