In this last video for the Screen Side Chat I'm going to address a couple questions that I think are kind of related and concern public goods and value of resources. The first question was by Shirley. And she asked, what does Stanford University offer that is unique that no one else can provide? And I asked this in the lecture. And I wasn't trying to be too controversial with that. What I was kind of asking was, what is the kind of valued resource that Stanford affords? What is the resource we have? And I think a lot of you mentioned, you know, feasible answers which are you know we have a credential degree prestige, I mean it's an elite institution in many ways. We have networks, contacts that are feasible through this institution. And we have expertise, knowledge, right? So all of those things fit. And then others mentioned a culture. It's distinct as a culture. It's very entrepreneurial and open here. And so it's kind of unique in that way. But, you know, asking whether those are resources that are unique to Stanford, do we have a monopoly on those? No. And moreover, I think what I was kind of, maybe I was trying to imply. And I think Wendy Nie does a good job on her comments, or her posts, of picking up on this. That the creation of online courses, particularly with the inventor, the Stanford inventors of Coursera, this has created a whole set of issues about changing value in these features. It's feasible in a short time here that credentials will be given online. That the funding from teaching will disappear. That we can provide this knowledge freely. And in many ways even the kind of advanced pedagogical kinds of efforts like group work or projects could be implemented on the site. And moreover worries about cheating could be also checked very easily with these videos right in front of us, that catch us whether we have facial recognition or whatever. So all these is feasible, and it's coming, and it's challenging or altering the value of the resources that the University is based upon. And there's a lot of unknowns about this. Like, we don't know whether offering away all this undermines the value of the resource. Right? And we're trying to explore it. And I think there are also some interesting dependence relations that occur. Coursera's a private company and the University here created a new platform, internally, called Class2Go. Which you can look up and they have a couple courses there and they're going to expand it. And if you think about why they did that, I think it is a resource dependence argument, that if all these universe, if there is no other platform, or if it's centralized on one then the dependence on this is problematic for the university. That we would give up our intellectual property and the like, moreover it kind of hinders competition to have no other platforms. So that's a problem. And it's a nonprofit, Class2Go is, whereas Coursera is a private for profit. So, there are differences, and I'm not fully sure how it's all working out but it's clear that the creation of this internal one, Class2Go, is concerned about the pendants. There are contracts between the University and Coursera in terms of knowledge and sharing. And it's very interesting in terms of who owns the data of this course. Stanford owns my course. And, arguably if I ever went to Google or a for-profit that I would lose rights to all of this material that Stanford would retain it. Or if I go to another non-profit, like I don't know, Princeton, I would keep the course with me. So, there are various kinds of scenarios here about who owns the resource and what its value is according to how much you allow it to go out in the world. I think in many ways by being involved in this process, and being inventors of it, and, my case, we're kind of trying to push the envelope in terms of adapting that technology, so it gets closer to this sharing. I think it is shifting where the resource values in the university will reside, where we would give away. The public good would be the knowledge, itself and the returns would be to the reputation of the university as a nonprofit for the public good. And that's what it's supposed to be, right. And that by sharing that, maybe the internal activity will focus more on research, the interactions there with my students and with people face-to-face. And the teaching could be done in this kind of way in a more economical way that would afford more access. So yeah, I do think it also fits Stanford's culture to actually do this. But we're all trying to figure out what it means. And I'll talk more about this in the course as we go along. Like week nine, it'll be clear that this challenge is legitimacy of what a higher institution of education is, and what it has to convey, and whether a classroom has to be the way to do things or if there are other means. And some of us are very open about exploring that, and that's what you're seeing in these kinds of platforms. And I think that Stanford's very open and willing to work with both Coursera or other platforms that they create themselves. So, you're going to see that, too. The second question was, is there a danger, I think it's actually related to the one, the first one about Stanford and Coursera a little bit, which is. Are there dangers of holding on to a scarce resource? And when does it become advisable to share it? And this was one Lody posted and she meant it with regard to oil and I know others of you talked about water as related, but I think even knowledge. I mean, universities have become very expensive and knowledge has become this scarce resource or credentials have become a scarce resource. There are all kind of things that will get affected as more and more people probably get a credential through these means, and maybe of equal quality eventually, or even 50% the equality for a fraction of the cost. That's going to change things, and it'll be interesting to see how that pans out. Is it advisable? Well, so we had a series of things about when it's advisable to share or when is it advisable to not monopolize a resource. And I think some of you talked about this. And it is an issue of business ethics to some extent. And I mentioned that in an earlier screen side chat a couple weeks ago. But I think it's also one of balancing multiple resource needs. Money is just one resource. But there are others like knowledge. But also goodwill and trust. And when it comes to geopolitics, if you hoard oil or water, that can lead to other kinds of problems or other costs on other dimensions of value and resources. So I think that you have to think of it as more multidimensional in terms of what's going on. There are multiple resources being exchanged and used here. And, moreover, the value of any particular resource within these institutions is shifting. Like I said, with the advent of Coursera, I think you will see things shift in terms of what is considered a monetary value. I like Michael's example that he related about rattling saber. He said, American Airlines had a proprietary reservations software program that it decided to allow its competitors to use. So, it became an industry standard. And American maintained an advantage based on its superior ability to use the software. So, what's nice about this, in some ways is it's kind of reflective of Stanford's effort to do these online courses. Again, one thing to keep in mind is, I am not officially, this is not an official Stanford course, it's a course from me. And Stanford's not, until it's credentialed, they will not claim it in some ways, in terms of value and attributions of credit. It's indirectly so through someone like me, who's affiliated with the University. But I think the point of Michael is nice in that by doing this kind of resource to the world we actually have a leg up for ourselves in changing this landscape, and the dependencies in it, and making sure that maybe we're on the forefront of it. So I think there's something to that and I really thought that was a nice insight or comparison. But, ultimately, I think value is something pretty hard to attribute. And Tara picked up on this in my lectures. And it's mostly because there are so many different things that we can regard as valuable and on different dimensions. There are other things that people could do to share resources too that are like these alliances that Lody mentioned and her own work on natural parts. But I think there's other ways in which you can share resources and have an outlook for the public good. And one of the things that I've notice is an increase in these investment portfolios that individuals have and companies have that have ethics tied to them. But, you also see companies, like, Google, that try to make sure that their practices are consistent with their motto and mission. So, it's kind of a blending of nonprofit with profit kinds of concerns with the public good, and collective value. And, I think there's something to the argument that a collective good, and a collective value, may not necessarily be the same as the value a firm gets out of something. The same concerns of exchange in resources there. So there is some kind of potential for a problem since you have to think about which organizations actually look out for the collective good, and the collective values, and share resources. And those tend to be governments for the people, hopefully, and then also, for their citizens. But then also nonprofit organizations that because of their nonprofit status, and notice that regulations allow them to have that status and to function as such, in so long as they share things. And so I think you do see that kind of in place within our societies. As a kind of organization that's supposedly looking out for efforts to share. So that's my answer to those kinds of questions. I look forward to next week, it'll be network forms of organization and kind of an extension of this week in many ways. And I'll look forward to seeing you on the forum.
