Complete South Park free online and the future of distance education

Russian elections? 

Venezuelan constitutional referenda? 

Nahhhh, the biggest story this weekend is the announcement that Viacom is going to archive the complete South Park online.

For free.

For folks who know where to look, of course, getting South Park for free online isn't all that difficult.  But what's so great about this latest development is that it'll be completely legal.  Viacom's success in archiving the Daily Show--making all the episodes available for free was followed by a jump in the ratings--has apparently led it to conclude that the best way to promote broadcast television is to give shows away online.

Which pretty much confirms what I've been thinking about online distance education.  Y'see, there are a bunch of hearty noble souls out there in nonprofit university land who see online education as a potential goldmine.  Blogs, podcasts, wikis--the assumption is you'll pay for 'em at full price tuition or a little less.  Post it, and they will buy.

Nope.  Sorry.  Not gonna happen.

If popular entertainment such as South Park hasn't able to find a sustainable fee-based model, I don't see how higher education--which is far less funny--is going to draw a critical mass of paying customers.  Sure, a few places on the margins might be able to make a few bucks that way--a Phoenix for non-traditional students and elites like Harvard or Stanford for folks who want to backdoor into the brand names--but for the majority of academic institutions the returns just won't be there.  People aren't going to pay to watch or listen to most lectures, and your average professor--myself included--doesn't have the time to transform forty-five hours of a real-world seminar into professional-quality ten-minute instructables, particularly ones for which you'd be willing to shell out twenty-grand a year.

Instead, I see online education primarily as a marketing tool.  Professors and, yes, students give information away for free, and maybe, if we're bit lucky, folks will want to join the real-world community themselves by paying tuition.  It's a gambit, sure, but it's also 'liberal" education in the truest sense of the word--and it may be the key to the survival of the university itself.