In other words, we need a little more humility about the potential role of OERs. There are niche markets such as continuing education that can still be very large that can be served by initiatives such as edX and MOOCs. But the real value of OERs will be to shift instructors away from the creation and delivery of content to focusing on how best learning can be developed and facilitated for, in and by our students. This way we will avoid developing automatons and instead will be developing people who can think for themselves.

And so many people in web design have been trying to figure out how do we make a web page that sucks every single person in the known universe in. And when you’re trying to get expert answers to difficult questions, that is the opposite problem. You actually want to drive away as many morons as you possibly can, hopefully as quickly as possible.

Change isn’t just about technology, of course. Those things that a screen cannot offer – community, tuition, interpersonal dialogue, shared space and time – are only going to feel more precious amid the increasingly rich educational pickings online. Above all, though, it’s having access to a screen in the first place that counts. Achieve that, and you can build from scratch – or rebuild – whatever local structures will best support a community of education and aspiration. Some may resemble, or develop from, current institutions. Many won’t, and shouldn’t, not least because much of what constitutes an institution in the first place is expressly designed to resist reform.