White House: Innovation in Higher Education — from elearnspace.org by George Siemens
Excerpt from George’s posting (emphasis DSC):
A few weeks ago, I received an invitation to the White House. The invitation was somewhat cryptic, but basically stated that the focus on the meeting was on quality and innovation.
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2. Higher education generally has no clue about what’s brewing in the marketplace as a whole. The change pressures that exist now are not ones that the existing higher education model can ignore. The trends – competency-based learning, unbundling, startups & capital inflow, new pedagogical models, technology, etc – will change higher education dramatically.
3. No one knows what HE is becoming. Forget the think tanks and the consultants and the keynote speakers. No one knows how these trends will track or what the university will look like in the future. This unknowability stems from HE being a complex systems with many interacting elements. We can’t yet see how these will connect and inter-relate going forward. The best strategy in a time of uncertainty is not to seek or force the way forward, but to enter a cycle of experimentation. The Cynefin Framework provides the best guidance that I’ve seen on how to function in our current context.
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7. Expect a future of far greater corporate involvement in HE. VC funds are flowing aggressively and these funders are also targeting policy change at local, state, and national levels. We aren’t used to this level of lobbying and faculty is unprepared to respond to this. Expect it. Your next faculty meeting will involve a new student success system, a personalized learning system, an analytics system, a new integrated bootcamp model, new competency software, new cloud-based computing systems, and so on. Expect it. It’s coming.
8. Expect M & A activities in higher education. I fully anticipate some combination of partnering with companies like General Assembly, creation of in-house bootcamps, or outright acquisitions by innovative universities.
Higher Education is moving from a 4 year relationship to students to a 40 year relationship.
From DSC:
[First of all, if you read this George, thanks for sharing your experiences, reflections, and recommendations from your recent trip to the White House. I/we appreciate it.]
I can’t agree with — and emphasize — George’s second point (above) strongly enough. Too often, I think we have our heads and eyes pointed downward, busy in our work; we fail to look up and see what’s happening all around us. We neglect to see the trends that are occurring and that will likely have an impact on us. If we were doing this, as we should be doing, several of our priorities would instantly change and there would be a much stronger sense of urgency in identifying some new directions/strategic initiatives/experiments within institutions of traditional higher education.
I don’t see our institutions competing with our typical/normal peer groups of the past. More and more, I think that we are competing with the new models, startups, and alternatives to traditional higher education. Yes, traditional institutions of higher education can respond and change — some have been doing so already. But how many of our institutions within the overall learning ecosystems are not experimenting? How many of our institutions have their heads buried in the sand, waiting for the good old days to return? Those days are not going to return. They’re gone. That ride is over. We need to wake up and adapt before the alternatives gain momentum (perhaps even borrowing some strategies from the alternatives, hmm?).
This is why I’m big on experimentation and the implementation of TrimTab Groups within higher education.
Finally, you may not like the word “disruption” and you may think it’s overused. But I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.
As George warns in his posting, there are dramatic changes to higher education coming down the pike. George is not one to hype things up — he is a level-headed deep thinker. I’d suggest that we listen to what he’s saying to us via his experiences and reflections from participating in his recent meetings/conversations held at the White House.
