berklee's lessons for everyone
Today, the Berklee College of Music has released Berklee Shares, a site offering free music lessons for download. All content is available under a Creative Commons license, including mp3s embedded with CC licenses.
Free lessons for musicians, and a valuable lesson for the rest of us.
Bravo.
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Comments (11)
Free lessons for musicians, and a valuable lesson for the rest of us.
free lessons?
tuition to the berklee college of music for the recent summer program was $8,240 (non-refundable).
tuition for the fall semester is a whopping $9,340.
spring 2004, $9,620.
i wonder how much of this "free" site's development cost has been passed on to the shoulders of berkelee's students.
good thing berklee helps with a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid.)
more free.
any more free and soon no one will be able to afford it.
If you think that these lessons are somehow even close to the lectures, labs, individual instruction, or in-depth theory that is taught at Berkelee, you'd be mistaken. MIT also has courseware, freely downloadable on the internet:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html. By the same logic, libraries should be banned from carrying academic textbooks as well.
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Three Blind Mice: One aspect of information goods that distinguish them from, say, manufactured goods, is that they are non-rivalrous: once they are created, there's very little marginal cost involved in distributing them to more people. Presumably, these materials were already created by Berklee faculty for the paying customers--the students.
By allowing unlimited public access to these materials, there's no additional cost to the students, beyond the potential increase in bandwidth and storage needs, which I imagine is trivial compared to the total bandwidth and storage use of the college.
Every academic institutions has a limited number of seats. Why not provide information that has already been created for another purpose to people who can't fit in those seats, if there's no additional cost to the institution?
Adam Kessel wrote: One aspect of information goods that distinguish them from, say, manufactured goods, is that they are non-rivalrous: once they are created, there’s very little marginal cost involved in distributing them to more people.
Non-rivalous refers to consumption, not distribution. A non-rivalous asset is something which can be shared with others without reducing the benefits available to anyone. Jefferson said it most eloquently when he remarked that lighting one's taper from his own did not diminish the light of his.
As is often the case, eloquence conceals error. Jefferson has it half-right: information goods (or "knowledge" to use Jefferson's term) are indeed "non-rivalous" in regards consumption, but his simple analogy ignores another important economic consideration.
Say, for example, the candle in Jefferson's hand allows him to occupy a portion of the market for the production of light... lighting another's candle from his own creates a competitor and diminishes the value his own candle.
Similarly, when knowledge allows you to occupy a portion of a particular market, sharing the knowledge with others creates competitors and diminishes the value of your knowledge. In an economic, the consumption of knowledge is inherently rivalous.
In the case of Berklee, or MIT, offering on-line course for which they expect others to pay, decreasess the value of the knowledge for those who are expected to pay.
And yet, Berklee charges more every year, even as then undermine the value of what they are selling.
I accpet that one cannot compare an on-line music education with classroom instruction and it is here my comparasion suffers. But certainly there is a cost associated with Berklee's on-line music training. Unless the users pay, someone else does.
My point is that making something "free" is rarely without cost, it is just a shifting of cost.
That's a different point than I thought you were making originally. My response concerned direct costs. It sounded like you were connecting rising tuition with this free service, and my response was that the direct cost to Berklee (and thus to its paying students) is negligible for providing this service.
Now it sounds like your claim is that your education itself is devalued since other people can now get for free what you have paid for. Although I understand your claim, I'm not sure it's necessarily true. A lot of what you pay for at University is your degree. You could sit in on an entire education's worth of classes at many universities without even being noticed, and thus you would "get" the education for free, but the economic value (in terms of, say, career potential) is significantly less because you have no degree.
There is also the possibility that this sort of open courseware approach could boost the prestige of the institution and thus increase the value of your degree. I suspect there is some of that effect with MIT's open courseware projects.
With a college like Berkelee, where so much of the education lies in physically attending and receiving live instruction, I'm going to argue that the 'giving away' of the courses has almost nothing to do with a shift in cost.
Performance, technique with your specific instrument, improvisation, and collaborative effort is where the value lies with a school like Berkelee. The "courses" given away for free online are an extension of what it has been doing for years: making their custom textbooks available to the public. (for a price, of course)
I also agree with Adam that you pay for the degree when you pay at Berkelee, in addition to the education. I'll go a step further and point out another advantage that paid students receive that online courses and texbooks don't provide: examinations. While quizzes can be found in textbooks, current written/oral examinations and performance recitals are not.
I'm willing to bet that the costs associated with putting courses online aren't nearly as large as you might think, and like Adam mentioned, may only help to further the interest in attending the school.
You might even say that viewing the courses at Berkelee and MIT online for free is somewhat analogous to reading excerpts or "look inside the book" at Amazon. :)
Interesting thread so far.
I am VP at Berklee and responsible for this effort.
The costs to deliver the free music lessons online is not insignificant. In fact the college is investing part of its endowment to bring these programs to life. We are not charging our students.
I also agree that over time, expanding the impact of Berklee and our ability to enrich the music space will ultimately benefit our students. Time will tell.
We also have an online school which is a bridge between the free lessons and the campus experience. The free lessons are part of an overall offering that includes free, online and on-campus programs.
And yes, Berkleeshares is similar to the Amazon effort. You get a taste of Berklee here, and a glimpse into what happens at Berklee College of Music and what we have to offer. But, at the same time you get a legitimate music lesson for free from real experts in the field. Many people dig it.
There is no substitute for studying with an instructor, but that does not diminish the value of the free lessons. The response so far has been very encouraging and positive.
My message!
Yes I would suggest a class on online collaboration for music producers to collaborate from across the world!
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