A University of Leeds professor is arguing that the focus on open and accessible elarning will result in an environment where only the elite will have access to certain knowledge. "Many of these courses veer towards mundane everyday knowledge and they do not give students access to the specialist knowledge that forms the bases for generalisation and critique," argues sue Clegg. I would be more concerned were it not for the fact that this specialized knowledge is already reserved for an elite, and that open and accessible learning is rapidly shrinking the range of that specialized knowledge - the connectivism courses that we ran, or the AI course run by Norvig and Thrun opened up to the general public knowledge they would never have had access to in a pre-open-learning world. Hey, my first contribution to open learning was my guide to the logical fallacies, which quite literally formed the bases for generalisation and critique. So, no, this is a red herring argument, based on facts that are demonstrably not true.
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