Changing Higher Education

Knowledge Management: an expanded role for higher ed in a changing world

In a post back in 2006 entitled What business are we in?, I suggested that a broader definition of the business of higher education might be Knowledge Management. At the time, the pieces were not in place to envisage how such a definition might usefully extend the roles of the university. Some key pieces now seem to be in place. Lifelong post- baccalaureate learning has become a career necessity for an ever-increasing number of workers; employers are struggling to hire and retain employees with skill sets needed to meet challenges and opportunities created by rapidly developing technologies and pressures of globalization; the development of competency based stackable modules has opened up the potential for just-in-time learning that meets career needs of learners and simultaneously fits with knowledge needs of employers; and the centrality of the traditional academic degree hierarchy is being challenged by development of competency-based descriptions of workforce needs. The present COVID -19 upheaval of life in general has upended the job market, and the eventual recovery of the economy can perhaps be facilitated by a universities playing a more expansive role in meeting knowledge needs of industry. This post considers how a Knowledge Management role for universities might be envisaged today.

 

 

"Baumol's cost disease" is the answer to a different question

In 1966, William Baumol and William Bowen looked at the origins of rising salaries for live performances (music, theater, dance), and noted that an underlying issue was that such performances could not easily be made more efficient - productivity could not be increased (Baumol and Bowen, Wikopedia). The oft-quoted ( and quite convincing) formulation of this concept is that a Beethoven quartet must be performed by exactly the same number of musicians today as was required in the 19th century, and that the quartet requires roughly the same amount of time to perform. No increase in productivity over two centuries! This inability to increase productivity should, according to simple economic arguments, lead to flat incomes - rising income usually is a result of increased productivity. However, despite this, salaries in the performing arts had risen over time. Baumol and Bowen concluded that this occurred because it was necessary to keep salaries on a par with those in industries that were seeing productivity increases in order to keep workers in the performing arts. This "push" of salaries in industries without productivity increases is called Baumol's cost disease.

Very often, when someone poses the troubling question, " why is college so expensive?", the response is simply "Baumol's cost disease", said with an authority that suggests that should settle the discussion. In fact, used in this way, Baumol's cost disease is like the magician's gesture that is designed to get the audience's attention away from place where something important is happening. In reality, customer's don't care about the cost of making a product, they are concerned about the price they must pay, and that difference leads one down a potentially fruitful path of reflection about both Baumol's formulation, and critical issues in higher education.

Whither alternative (and improved) credentialing?

I recently served on a panel at a meeting organized by the California Higher Education Innovation Council to look at "Alternative Credentials and Unbundling the Degree: Meeting Employer Needs or Short-Circuiting Proven Approaches?" Our panel was challenged beforehand by its moderator, Ryan Craig, to imagine how conditions had to change over the next decade in order for alternative credentialing ("e.g. nanodegrees and badges" according to the meeting invitation) to become a major force in higher education. I will make no attempt to review the many arguments advanced on this subject at the meeting, but simply describe some of my own thoughts (however tentative) that were stimulated by this challenge.

There are obviously three broad constituencies interested in questions of higher education credentialing: students, government, and employers. My belief is that the most important of these in determining whether alternative credentialing takes hold will be employers: if employers find it truly useful, most students will enthusiastically sign on, and government will see little reason to block something that employers and students find to be of real value. 

An update on StraighterLine - a "disruptor in the making"?

A few years ago, I identified a few organizations that I thought were doing things in higher education that were examples of approaches that potentially could be disruptive to the field (Potential disruptions in the higher education space). Among these is StraighterLine, which offers primarily introductory level college courses much more inexpensively and flexibly than traditional colleges and universities.  Entry level courses are relatively similar in many if not most colleges, and at the same time are the most profitable for the colleges because they are most often taught in large classes. If students in large numbers were to opt for the StraighterLIne combination of online convenience and low cost, it would prove quite disruptive to the budgets of many traditional institutions. 

The problem with CA higher education is that no one asks what the problem is

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
Henry Ward Beecher

The editorial board of the Los Angeles times weighed in on December 29 on the funding situation of the UC system with Finally, UC gets budget attention  . This latest Times editorial joined earlier ones about the UC in demonstrating a certain naivety on the part of the Times editorial board in matters of higher education in California. The editorial strongly supports President Napolitano's solution to the UC problems - send more money - and egregiously mischaracterizes Governor Brown's proposals as "mechanistic". If only the UC issues were simply about "budget"!

A business model view of changing times in higher education

 

As my regular readers know, I have written several posts that utilize a business model approach to look at one aspect or another of higher education. Last year, readers suggested that I combine several of these posts in an article that would combine multiple threads - ideally in a coherent fashion! The resulting article has found a good response among policy and institutional leaders, and so I thought that some of my other readers might also find it interesting. I have pasted it in below. For those who would prefer it in PDF, they can Download Business model view of change. Curiously, the original document contains Endnotes that were stripped out by Typepad, but they are not crucial to the arguments. 

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Changing times in higher education viewed through the prism of the business model

Lloyd Armstrong

Summary: The environment for higher education in the United States is changing rapidly. The effects of this changing environment will not be the same at all institutions, however. This article uses a business model approach to look at some of these environmental changes from a perspective that gives leaders tools to better understand how various changes might impact their own institutions, and how they might best respond.

 

Barriers to innovation and change in higher education

I recently wrote an article entitled Barriers to Innovation and Change in Higher Education for the TIAA-CREF Institute.  In it, I used a business model perspective to analyze obstacles to change in higher education. This approach facilitates drawing in insights from research on change across a broad spectrum of organizations and industries. I won't try to reproduce the analysis presented in that article, but will just indicate a few my conclusions:

Fitting a square disruptive peg into a round sustaining hole

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds

John Maynard Keynes

 

The Higher Education Reconciliation Act (HERA) of 2005 opened the door to competency based degrees by stating that 

instructional programs that use direct assessment instead of credit or clock hours to measure student learning may qualify as a Title IV-eligible program if the assessment is consistent with the school’s or program’s accreditation.

 Since that time, the Department of Education (DOE) has moved extremely tentatively towards approval of competency based degrees, approving only three thus far.  Recently we learned that the Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Education  has found that the Department's extremely tentative moves towards accepting competency based degrees were not tentative enough: 

We found that the Department did not adequately address the risks that schools offering direct assessment programs pose to the Title IV programs and did not establish sufficient processes to ensure that only programs meeting Federal regulatory requirements are approved asTitle IV eligible.

The future of MIT undergraduate education: a case study of disruption

On July 28, 2014, MIT released a very important report looking at its future: Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education, Final Report. This, taken with its November 21, 2013 (and more free-wheeling) precursor Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education, Preliminary Report, form one of the most penetrating and visionary self-studies that I have  seen - or thought I would ever see - from a major university. Many of the recommendations put MIT on the path of potentially disrupting its own business model. How MIT got to this point provides an excellent case study of the process by which a higher education institution might accomplish this very difficult transformation.

Are lectures detrimental to student learning?

Carl Wieman recently called a very important Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' article to my attention. The article's title clearly describes its subject and conclusion: Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. The authors of the article - Scott Freeman, Sarah L. Eddy, Miles McDonough, Michelle K. Smith, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt,and Mary Pat Wenderoth - are, or have been, associated with the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, where some excellent research is being done on the use of active learning in biology.  

Reputation and brand in the changing world of higher education

The world of higher education has obviously entered into a period of many changes. Major universities have jumped into the MOOC game, classrooms have been flipped, competency based learning is going mainstream, government at all levels is demanding measurable outcomes, traditional tuition increases that outpace inflation are coming under attack, non-traditional students have become the new tradition, and the continuing tight financial environment for higher education is forcing many institutions to reexamine their organization and mission. Under such conditions, it is interesting to consider the bases for reputation and brand in higher education, and ask how the changes we are seeing might impact the brand and reputation of different types of institutions. What follows are my first tentative steps to address this issue.

Now here is something that could be really disruptive

David G.W.Birch recently posted a very thought-provoking contribution Badges? We Don't Need No Linkedin Badges on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network. In it, he argues that social networks are beginning to replace other intermediaries (hacks) in the trust networks that we use to build efficiencies in society. These hacks are such things as credit ratings, badges, dress codes, and (most pertinent for this post) diplomas - they increase our confidence that we understand the characteristics of people with whom we interact. However, through social networks, which enable everyone to contact everyone else instantaneously, we can now get real information about the actual knowledge, productivity, etc of an individual. As a result:

As social capital (the result of the computations across the social graph) becomes accessible and useable, the hacks will fade. A college degree will be worth less than it is now. Using hacks instead of real data is just not good enough in a connected world. Google was famous for its rigorous hiring criteria, but when its analysts looked at “tens of thousands” of interview reports and attempted to correlate them with employee performance, they found “zero” relationship. The company’s infamous interview brainteasers turned out not to predict anything. Even more interesting: Nor did school grade and test scores. As job performance data racks up, the proportion of Google employees with college degrees has decreased over time.

MITx and the transformation of residential education

    In short, to stay true to our educational values, we must seize the opportunity
to reimagine what we do and how we do it.
—President L. Rafael Reif

On December 19, 2011, MIT announced a new venture, MITx, that would offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.......

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”

Thus, MIT's leap into the then not-yet-named world of MOOCs from the outset has had a dual focus on how the growing field of online education could improve learning on its residential campus, and how MIT could project its education to new demographics. The perceived importance of MITx to the future of MIT was emphasized when President Hockfield stepped down, saying there were a few things on the horizon that would require decade-long leadership:

2013- the year of ups and downs for the MOOCs

The biggest thing in higher ed news during 2013 arguably was, as in 2012,  MOOCs. Some of the news was good, some was bad.

Much of the emphasis was on the continuing rise of the MOOCs. Coursera added university partners at a breakneck pace (107 partners), while edX expanded at a more sedate, ivy league pace (30 partners). Both expanded both domestically and globally, seeking out visible and prestigious partners wherever they might be. The English, meanwhile, counterattacked with their own MOOC, FutureLearn, which has 29 " leading UK and international universities" led by the venerable and highly respected online education expert The Open University. OpenupEd, an EU backed pan-European effort, brings together primarily open universities in the EU. The list of new MOOC providers is now very long, and very international, reflecting an apparently global enthusiasm for courses that enroll many tens of thousands of students.

From my perspective, another very important news item was that MOOC pioneer Udacity has teamed up with Georgia Tech and AT&T to offer a remarkably affordable ($6,600, about 1/6 of the campus-based program) Master of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. This low price master's from a highly respected institution in the field represents a sharp break from the traditional pricing structure of higher education. If this partnership is able to produces a high quality degree at this price point, it will provide a direct challenge to the online programs of other institutions that almost always are priced comparably to the on-campus programs. Depending on how this venture works out, this could be the first truly disruptive use of the MOOC approach.

Accreditation: ally or obstacle as higher education wrestles with change?

Goldie Blumenstyk recently published a very nice description of the accreditation issues that led to the shut down of the  generally acclaimed for-profit/nonprofit partnership of Altius Education and Tiffin College.  As Blumenstyk points out, there are critics who feel that this demonstrates that the accreditation system is broken, and others who say that it has done what it was designed to do. It may be that both positions are correct, as I shall discuss in this post.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have connections to both parties. I was on the advisory board of Altius until it closed down recently, and Sylvia Manning, President of the HLC (which challenged the partnership), was my Executive Vice Provost at USC for several years and remains a good friend. I have no interest in getting into a discussion of the merits of the decision of HLC, but rather would like to put it into a larger context of the strengths and limitations of the accreditation system. 

Are tenure track professors better teachers?

Higher education is faced with many challenges at this time. Two, however, stand out as providing critical tests for the future viability of many institutions. The first is the growing set of constraints on revenues, and the second is the increasing necessity to improve student learning significantly (How can we think about the wave of new innovations in higher education?). Figlio, Schapiro, and Soter (FSS) recently published an important National Bureau of Economic Research working paper whose provocative title I have borrowed for the title of this post. That paper has important implications for responding to both of these challenges.

Analyzing data for eight cohorts of first year students at Northwestern University, FSS conclude:

We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s average students and less-qualified students.

Competency-based transcripts and information transmission

InsideHigherEd has a very interesting article on the competency based transcripts that Northern Arizona University is now offering to students enrolled in its new competency-based program.  The sample transcript attached to the article shows the competencies that are being assessed, and how a mythical student performed on each of them. 

The transcript is not perfect, but it is a big a step forward! I have long been amazed at higher ed's attachment to its traditional grading system. Faculty speak glowingly of the manifold dimensions of the learning going on in their classes (this is the reason outcome measures are unacceptable, of course), but at the end of the semester, they are happy to sum up the students new-found mastery of these manifold dimensions into a simple letter grade, A-F. The information not contained in this grade is very large, and does a disservice to the students, faculty who will be teaching the students in the future, and future employers who want to know what the students actually know.

Academic freedom for whom?

A significant change in any component of a stable business model is likely to have significant impact on all other components of the model. In an earlier post, I discussed the business model for higher education (How can we think about the new wave of innovations in higher education?), and pointed out that the profusion of off- the-shelf new college courses (NCLCs) such as MOOCs and open courseware provide an important new resource in higher education.  It is not surprising that this new resource has the potential to shake up the traditional business model significantly, and in a series of three posts (How a course-rich world might impact higher education: I, II, III) I considered some of the changes that this resource might produce. In this post, l continue that discussion by considering how this new resource of NCLCs raises some important issues related to one of the core principles of the process component of the higher education business model: Academic Freedom.

The most commonly quoted rational for academic freedom comes from the AAUP 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure. That statement begins:

The purpose of this statement is to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities.Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.

Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.It carries with it duties correlative with rights.

For understandable reasons, this concept of academic freedom has lead to a very general acceptance of the idea that the curriculum of an institution "belongs" to the faculty - they use their professional expertise to define the curriculum broadly, and to maintain overall excellence in implementation.

However, the next-to-last sentence in the AAUP description above has a somewhat hidden asymmetry that is put into greater evidence by the arrival of the NCLCs. Because the faculty control the curriculum, the student's freedom is the freedom to learn what the teacher who has freedom to teach is teaching. That obviously made sense when the only courses available to the student were those being presented by their faculty. But now, with the arrival of the MOOCs, open courseware, courses produced by such companies as Pearson, etc, there is an enormous range of courses easily accessed by any student. Is the asymmetry of learning and teaching contained in the AAUP guidelines still appropriate?

Why MOOCs threaten academic freedom - too much value for the students

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the use of MOOCs contains the following fascinating interview:

Chandrakant Panse, a professor of microbiology at MassBay (Community College) and president of the union chapter there, does not think MOOCs will make local faculty members obsolete. But Mr. Panse does think an edX certificate, acknowledging the completion of an MIT course, is worth more to students than three credits at a community college. And that could pose a threat to academic freedom in the future.

"The MIT certificate has a lot more value in the marketplace than three course credits at MassBay—absolutely," Mr. Panse says. In the context of a student's job search, says the professor, an edX certificate "is going to matter tremendously more than saying I have three credits at MassBay for doing a programming course."

Considering the possibility that edX courses will become part of the curriculum at MassBay, Mr. Panse believes that students will want the opportunity to earn edX certificates in addition to credit toward their MassBay degrees. That demand could prompt administrators to require that MassBay professors hew closely to the curriculum prescribed by the MIT professors.

How a course-rich world might impact higher education: III. existing traditional institutions

In the first post in this series, How a course-rich world might impact higher education: I. Technology vs pedagogy, I looked at some of the characteristics of the readily-available, "off the shelf" new college level courses (NCLCs) that have created a course-rich world. In particular, I examined the potential of the NCLCs to produce disruptive innovation in higher education.  In the second, How a course-rich world might impact higher education: II. Creating new institutions, I discussed using this new course-rich resource to create new institutions using higher education business models that are radically different from the faculty-centric model that is traditional in higher education. Because these institutions are creating business models that are optimized around the NCLCs and other similar online offerings, they are using the NCLCs in a potentially disruptive fashion.

In this post, I turn attention to some potential uses of these NCLCs in existing traditional non-profit institutions of higher education.  As is well known, such innovations are often used to produce both sustaining innovation when utilized within the context of the traditional business model, and disruptive innovation when used within the context of a new business model optimized around the new innovation. Because of the wide variety of traditional institutions of higher education and of the challenges they face, we can anticipate that NCLCs will be used in both sustaining and disruptive modes in this sector.

How a course-rich world might impact higher education: II. Creating new institutions

In part I of this series, How a course-rich world might impact higher education: I. Technology vs pedagogy, I looked at some of the characteristics of the readily-available new college level courses (NCLCs) that have created a course-rich world. In this post, I discuss using this new course-rich resource to create new institutions using higher education business models that are radically different from the faculty-centric model that is traditional in higher education.

In these new models few, if any, traditional, permanent faculty are needed to produce the educational product, which is provided primarily by the NCLCs. Social media increasingly is used to both improve learning and create peer relationships. Examples of such models can be found among the many organizations trying to provide essentially free degrees (e.g. University of the People),  parts of typical degrees such as the first two years (e.g. StraighterLine), and lower-cost degrees (e.g. WGU).

A step forward in California, an ambiguous step at HLC

California's Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg has just introduced a very important bill called An online student access platform (with details in amendments):

Creates a faculty-led, quality-first framework allowing online course providers to have strategically selected courses approved and placed in a state-level clearinghouse through which students may access the courses and receive credit at the UC, CSU, and California Community Colleges

This bill seeks to remedy the very significant lack of capacity in California public higher education that is reflected in the enormous number of applicants unable ot gain entrance into the systems, large wait-lists for seats in important classes, and the delayed times-to-graduation.

How a course-rich world might impact higher education: I. Technology vs pedagogy

This is the first of three posts in which I look at some of the ways in which the new, "off the shelf" course-rich world created by the Open Courseware Consortium, MOOCs, commercial publishers such as Pearson, etc.( all of which I called the new college level courses, or NCLCs) might impact the business model of higher education.  

In an earlier related post, How can we think about the wave of new innovations in higher education?, I suggested that the course-rich world would greatly change the Resources box of the higher eduction business model. In a subsequent post, Michael Raynor's analysis of disruption - and higher education, I reviewed Michael Raynor's extension of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, and promised to apply his results to a study of the NCLCs.  This is that promised post, in which I look at some of the characteristics of the NCLCs that may determine whether they have the potential to drive a disruptive innovation.

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Raynor's work indicates that the speed with which the NCLCs can improve in value will tell us something about the ways in which their use may impact higher education. Thus, we should first focus on the characteristics of the NCLCs and not on specifics of how they might be used. To think about that, we need to attempt a definiton of "value" for the NCLCs.

"Value" in education is a mixture of attributes that students may desire. Since we are talking about NCLCs, we are really concerned only with those attributes most connected to education itself, and not to related areas such as social growth or research. The value of education itself is certainly composed of several components, among which are: the effectiveness and depth of the learning that can be achieved; the ease and convenience of access; the academic brand of the provider; and recognizable certification. However, issues of such as specifics of how the NCLCs are used and whether certification follows are really part of the Procedures box in the higher education business model, and will be discussed in subsequent posts of this series. In this post, I will look at questions of the academic brand of the NCLCs and the effectiveness and depth of learning that can be achieved - and how fast they might be improved. 

Michael Raynor's analysis of disruption - and higher education

In a recent post that focused on the business model for higher education, I discussed how I believe that the greatest pressure on the "Resources" component of that model comes from the new "off the shelf" course-rich world in which we live. College-level courses, which formerly had to be created in-house by faculty, are suddenly to be found everywhere. MOOCs are, of course, a very visible and discussed new component of this course-rich world, but not the only component. Other sources of the course-rich world are textbook companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill and open source materials such as can be found at the OpenSourceWare Consortium.   I will be looking at some of these new sources of college-level courses (NCLCs) and considering how they might impact the higher education business model in a series of upcoming posts. First, however, I want to introduce another approach that I have found useful in these reflections.

 Michael E Raynor's The Innovator's Manifesto: Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth extends Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation in interesting directions. His goal is to make disruption a predictive theory, so he focuses on identifying the characteristics of an innovation that increase the likelihood that it will eventually be disruptive. He also considers the relationships of some of the characteristics of the innovation to the speed with which it can grow into disruption. This post will focus on explaining his approach and some of his results that are most pertinent to higher education.

Obama's higher education views

As a back-up to President Obama's State of the Union speech, the White House has released The President's Plan for a Strong Middle Class and a Strong America. A much commented-on sentence in a section with the challenging title Holding colleges accountable for cost, value and quality reads:

The President will call on Congress to consider value, affordability, and student outcomes in making determinations about which colleges and universities receive access to federal student aid,either by incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system; or by establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results. 

The mention of "alternative system of accreditation" has understandably caused considerable discussion, and I would be remiss if I did not join that discussion. Before that, however, there is a very important point contained in the President's message that I think has not gotten appropriate attention. 

Should professors be replaced by a computer screen?

Cathy Davidson,  the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke University, has just published a post on the HASTAC site that I recommend to all. Its conclusion is clearly conveyed in its attention-grabbing title: If We Profs Don't Reform Higher Ed, We'll Be Re-Formed (and we won't like it). Her message is further underlined by inclusion of the slide (above) which closes many of her presentations.

Davidson discusses four reasons why there is currently a great deal of discussion about replacing professors with computer screens:

(1) Too many students worldwide want to go to college to be able to accommodate them all.

(2)  College in the U.S. costs too much

(3) Online education promises to be lucrative to for-profits

(4)  Our current educational system (kindergarten through professional school) is outmoded. 

 Davidson makes excellent cases for each of these points in her post. She closes by briefly describing some of the efforts she has encountered in her travels that are beginning to address some of these issues. Rather than weakening her excellent arguments by attempting to summarize them, I will simply recommend that you read the original.

I would add another reason to this excellent list that is a slight modification of the 3rd point above:

(5) Online education promises to be lucrative to nonprofits

Just as Davidson says that (3) really bothers her, I will say that (5) really bothers me. Many of the traditional nonprofit universities and colleges are jumping into the online business because they see it as a new source of much needed revenue. As a former administrator, I understand the need for new revenues as much as anyone, so I am a fan of increasing revenues. My concern is that in most cases the online initiatives are not being done in a way that incorporates the online education into the educational mission of the institution - it is a financial, not educational advance. As a result, little emphasis is being placed on educational effectiveness in many of the new online programs. I have great fear that when the educational outcomes of many of these new programs are evaluated, they will be shown to be relatively ineffective. This result will lead many to conclude that online education is intrinsically inferior, when all it will really show is that inferior pedagogy leads to inferior learning. Nonetheless, such a negative, albeit flawed, analysis could be a big setback in the much needed expansion of effective online learning in higher education.   

 

Futurelearn -a UK entry into the universe of MOOCs

MOOCs such as edX, Coursera, and Udacity have obviously caught the attention of the higher education world,  In large part, the excitement has been generated by the participation in these ventures of many of the 800 pound gorillas of US research universities (e.g.Harvard, MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley). Suddenly, the highest elites of the US university world are plunging into online learning!

Consequently, one might be excused for looking askance at the recent headline in the Times Higher Education:

Open university launches British Mooc platform to rival US providers

Given that this MOOC (Futurelearn) does not include the 800 pound gorillas of the UK research university world such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College, how could Futurelearn have the weight to rival "our" MOOCs? **

How can we think about the wave of new innovations in higher education?

Much has been happening recently in higher education - MOOCs, competency based degrees, alternative credentialing, Presidential (of the US, that is) statements that real increases in tuition must stop, etc. This has led various observers to predict tsunamis, tipping points, crises, and/or disruptions for higher education.

How should one begin to analyze the possible impacts of this seemingly endless set of new "environmental conditions"? I find that a useful starting point is the business model of higher education.  The following picture describing the elements of a business model is taken from a recent publication, Disrupting College,  by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares (CHCS).   

 

This picture emphasizes that there are four key components of a business model, and that all of these components must fit together in an interdependent way in order for the model to be viable. The lock on the picture emphasizes that no one component can be changed without causing significant changes in the other components once the model has reached a viable equilibrium. 

Coursera and MITx - sustaining or disruptive?

Coursera continues to make headlines as additional "top tier" universities sign up to offer courses (16 institutions and 116 courses, at latest count), and hundreds of thousands of students sign up to take those courses. MITx, on the other hand, has not gotten much coverage lately, especially since the creation of EDx. MITx is moving much more deliberately, of course, with only one course up at this point (3 more announced for the Fall of 2012), so we know much less about how MITx will actually look and feel than we do about Coursera. However, Coursera and MITx seem potentially to represent very different approaches to the expansion of online learning, and those differences may be very important in determining the ultimate impact on higher education of online learning. In this post, I will explore some of those differences as I see them, and their potential implications.

Market-leaders can adapt to disruptive innovation!

One of the more striking - and disturbing - findings of Clayton Christensen's original work on disruptive innovation was that market-leaders were almost never able to cope with the attack of a disruptive innovator (see my earlier post). Even in cases in which leadership understood the danger posed by the disruptor, inertia and short-term economic constraints and incentives almost always led the market leaders to maintain their original trajectories. Over time, the disruptors produced better and cheaper products than the market leaders, and correspondingly the customers switched allegiances. The disruptors became the new market leaders, and the former market leaders often simply disappeared.

Since many have suggested that higher education shows all the characteristics of an industry that is ripe for disruptive innovation, this inability of market leaders to adapt in the face of disruption is rather disturbing.  However, there is good news from more recent research by Christensen and his group.