Is online education more like the global public goods?

摘要

Nowadays with the possibility of synchronous e-learning, online courses are becoming a new paradigm in education. But there are few studies systematically discussing the interplay between online courses and global education equality quantitatively. Here, we indicate that online education is more like the global public goods with on-rival and non-excludable in consumption. We establish an educational outcome model and indicate that popularity of online education is likely to give rise to the human capital augmentation, both for developing and developed countries. And this growth stems from the characteristics of global public goods. To analyze the possibility of the potential growth, we suggest that an online education club would help countries to escape from the dominant strategies of "Free ride", which is the common dilemma in public goods supply. So the cooperation would bring coordinated growth to countries with different advantages in educational resources. And this win-win situation offers an underlying driving force to the development of human capital and economics. This paper provides a view offering the deep understanding on reducing the gap of education outcome between countries, and get a coordinated development in the Internet or MOOCs Era. It gives more supports to the development of online education in the future. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.