Changing Higher Education

The high cost of funded research in colleges and universities

A college or university that does research ends up spending considerable resources of its own even when most of its research is “funded”. How and why is this the case, and where does the institution look to find the resources needed to cover this unfunded research cost? Undergraduate tuition seems like one likely source.

 

These internal research expenditures fall into two categories, which I will call “open” and “hidden”. As these terms may suggest, the first is a set of costs that are reported nationally by the NSF and consequently appear in numerous reports put out by the institutions themselves. On the other hand, hidden costs are well known, but seldom openly discussed even thought they contribute very significantly to the institutional cost of research .

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. 

Cost allocation in the research university and what it tells us

Universities often report a number that appears to indicate how much the university spends on instruction. We might believe that this number accurately represents teaching expenses and even do some analysis based on that belief. We would be wrong to do so. 

John V. Lombardi, in How Universities Work

This somewhat cynical observation by Lombardi was informed by his broad and sometimes painful experiences as Provost at Johns Hopkins University, President of the University of Florida, Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and President of the Louisiana State University System. However, in these times of heated discussions over who should pay for higher education and a background of rapidly increasing student debt,  it is important to have some idea of what the actual costs of producing that education are. In this post, I review some of the reasons why it is difficult to define the instructional costs at a research university, and why various constituencies might not want that information to be generally available. After discussing how a business model view simplifies some of the issues around calculating instructional costs, I describe a recent analysis of such costs in the University of California system, which reaches some surprising conclusions. These conclusions lead to a consideration of why cost -shifting between missions is so important in the current approach of the research university. Taken together, these results suggest that one of the key issues that should be focused on in order to control higher education prices are the synergies between the different functions of the research university and the actual "added value" to the customer of those synergies. In particular, the analysis suggests that rising prices in undergraduate education are not likely be controlled unless society finds alternative ways to fund a significant component of the cost of university research. 

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 UC system moves off in a dangerous direction

When Janet Napolitano was appointed president of the University of California System, I was disappointed. Just when the UC System really needed a visionary educational leader who could inspire faculty and administrators to make the significant changes needed for the university to thrive in a significantly new environment, a career big government bureaucrat was put at the helm. 

Unfortunately, President Napolitano's new budget proposal reflects her background- it is pure big government response to a problem. The UC must have a 5%/year increase in funding from the State, or the students must pay it via big tuition increases. All problems will be solved with more funding, not better management, not getting rid of waste, not creativity, not new approaches, just more money. Sic transit California as a center of can-do creativity - just turn on the money tap.

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.

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?

When will education become a priority for higher education?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a rather depressing interview with Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman on the subject of science teaching. Carl is one of the leaders in efforts to significantly improve student learning of science by utilizing state-of-the-art pedagogical principles (e.g A D- in science education).  He and others have demonstrated that remarkable improvements in learning can be obtained for a broad variety of disciplines in institutions of widely differing characteristics by using improved pedagogy (e.g How Learning Works.)

Most recently, he has tried to expand adoption of these approaches from the bully pulpit of his position as Associate Director of Science of The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. As described in the Chronicle article:

At the White House, Mr. Wieman tried to figure out what might actually get colleges and their faculty members to adopt proven teaching practices. His centerpiece idea was that American colleges and universities, in order to remain eligible for the billions of dollars the federal government spends annually on scientific research, should be required to have their faculty members spend a few minutes each year answering a questionnaire that would ask about their usual types of assignments, class materials, student interaction, and lecture and discussion styles.

Mr. Wieman believed that a moment or two of pondering such concepts might lead some instructors to reconsider their approaches. Also, Mr. he (sic) says, data from the responses might give parents and prospective students the power to choose colleges that use the most-proven teaching methods. 

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.

American Public Education and Fidelis link up

American Public Education, parent of the American Public University System, announced today that it was making a $4M investment in Fidelis Education as part of a new round of funding for Fidelis.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been on the advisory board for Fidelis for almost 2 years.  

Gunnar Counselman started Fidelis in 2011 to address the mismatch between the educational services offered in the typical college or university and the needs of service members leaving the military and seeking tertiary education leading to a civilian career. Over time, he recognized that what was needed was a "wrap around service" that helped to coordinate all of the elements of the university in a way that responded to the needs of the student, and he knew that he had to build a scalable approach. His resulting web based tools turned out to be so useful that his university partners asked that he make them available to their general student bodies.  

This new funding round enables Fidelis to focus on technology developments that will make these tools more useful to a broader audience. It will be interesting to see how it developes.

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).

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.   

 

Is Semester Online the beginning of the revolution?

I was delighted by the Inside Higher Education report that 10 top ranked universities have joined with 2U (formerly 2tor) to form a consortium called Semester Online:

Semester Online is the first-of-its-kind program to offer rigorous, online, for-credit undergraduate courses through a consortium of top-tier colleges and universities. The program will be delivered through a virtual classroom environment and interactive platform developed by 2U, formerly known as 2tor.

Semester Online courses will feature primarily the same faculty and curricula as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Students will experience a state-of-the-art virtual classroom, including live class sessions that connect students and renowned professors; compelling, richly produced, self-paced course materials; and a strong social network that allows students to collaborate and build relationships online.

Students will have the chance to take advantage of unique course offerings from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, courses they would not otherwise have access to. They will be able to work, travel, participate in off-campus research programs or manage personal commitments that in the past would have meant putting their studies on hold.

Credit will be awarded by the consortium member that provides the course, which will also determine admissions requirements for the course.  

The reason that I found this announcement exciting is tied to an article I wrote long ago and far away.

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.

How Learning Works

The bad news is that most data seem to show that students are not learning nearly so much in college as we would hope - or as we imagine is happening (see, e.g. Another study showing students are not learning). The good news is that learning research shows us how to improve those outcomes.  However, the additional bad news is that most academics have no idea what  the research says or, more important, what the research says should be done in a real classroom to get better learning. 

One of my collegues recently introduced me to an excellent book that seeks to remedy this last bit of bad news.   The book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, describes seven crucial principles of learning, the research that supports those principles, and their implications for teaching. Each principle is made more concrete by a set of instructional strategies that can be used for its implementation.  The authors of this work are Susan Ambrose, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha Lovett, and Marie Norman.  and the book is based on approaches developed at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon. 

**********

Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.

HERBERT A. SIMON

edX: a step forward- or backward?

edX, the new distance learning collaboration recently announced by MIT and Harvard, has gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so:

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced edX, a transformational new partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

Coming on the heals of the appearance of Coursera, Udacity, and the edX precursor, MITx, this has led numerous commentators to suggest that we have entered a veritable age of aquarius for massively open online courses (MOOCs). All of these efforts involve, to one degree or another, universities of the very top rank and each will offer online versions of university level courses using the most advanced technologies. Further, all will be open to anyone who wants to sign up, and the courses will either be free or involve a very nominal cost for e.g. testing. Importantly, however, none of these efforts will lead to course credit, degree or certificate from the universities involved. Instead, successful students can hope for a signed letter of completion from their well-known instructor or a certificate from the organization

Preliminary results are very exciting, indeed. Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, did an online course at Stanford that drew over 160,000 student, and Udacity has over 200,000 students signed up for its first six courses. MITx's first course enrolled about 120,000 students.

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.

Harvard inaugurates its Initiative for Learning and Teaching

ON ONE HAND:

The good news is that Harvard is beginning to play a public leadership role in increasing student learning! The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) had its inaugural event, a symposium, on February 3. HILT was founded as the result of a generous $40M gift from Harvard alumni Gustave and Rita Hauser. The invitation only event brought in several outside luminaries with considerable expertise in learning, such as Physics Nobel Laureate Carl Weiman, and around 300 people from the Harvard community including Harvard's own luminary in the field, Eric Mazur.

The poor state of undergraduate student learning over all has been chronicled in many books and studies (see an earlier discussion here).  One of the most readable of these books was written by Harvard's own Derek Bok - Our Underachieving Colleges, so the issues are not unfamiliar at Harvard itself. As Bok (and many others) pointed out, the problem is not that there aren't many well documented ways to greatly increase student learning, it is that these methods have not been adopted widely by colleges. The powerful forces of the status quo have dominated teaching and learning.  

What will The College of 2020 look like?

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

Niels Bohr

(Note: the following was first published as an invited contribution on The College of 2020 in parts 1 and 2. I reproduce it here for the benefit of my readers by permission of the editors of the College of 2020)

What will the College of 2020 look like? It probably will be similar in at least one way to the College of 2011 -there isn't any one archetypical College of 2011 and there won't be any one archetypical College of 2020 either. US higher education consists of about 4,500 accredited colleges of 2011 with an incredible diversity of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources. I would expect the same to be generally true in 2020, with some important caveats: I think there will be significantly fewer accredited colleges in 2020, and the mix of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources will be quite different from today.

These changes will be driven by two forces that push from different directions, but each leading to increasing fiscal constraints on higher education. On the one side, local and national governments are finding it increasingly difficult to support higher education at traditional levels. There a world-wide movement towards decreasing the role of government in providing social goods, and the US reflects that movement. In addition, other governmental costs such as health care, prisons, and retirements are growing rapidly and squeezing out areas such as education. On the other side, all of higher education utilizes a model whose costs over the last 30 years have steadily grown about 3% a year above CPI increase. In the tuition-dependent private sector, tuition has grown apace, i.e. roughly CPI plus 3% every year for the past three decades. The costs of higher education are reaching a point where government, parents, and students are beginning to question if the product is worth the price. The answer is increasingly "no" for private institutions that have lower brand value, but the "no" likely will move upstream in the value ladder over time as costs increase until only a relatively small number of high brand value private institutions are immune. On the public side, the answer is increasingly, "no, not given our fiscal constraints" no matter what the brand value of the institution.