.

 

.

From DSC, some examples:

  • Unbundling and Unmooring: Technology and the Higher Ed Tsunami — from educause.org by Audrey Watters
  • Unbundling Higher Education | From the Bell Tower –– from lj.libraryjournal.com by Steven Bell
    Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
    Recent events in higher education suggest a new trend — earning degrees by the course from multiple providers. Are we looking at the iTunes model of unbundled higher ed? Call it alt-HE.
  • Napster, Udacity, and the Academy — from Clay Shirky
    Excerpt:
    Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
    .
    It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.
    …
    But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.