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From DSC:
From DSC:
The tidal wave of technological change swept over Blockbuster and the article below shows how it drowned Kodak as well. These players were once at THEE top of their games…now they are either bankrupt or soon to be bankrupt (if things don’t change fast).
This relates to higher education as well, but I don’t think that we’ve seen anything yet (though 2012 may change that). Higher ed may have a limited window of time left before the conversation moves completely out of academia and higher ed as we know it gets left behind. The word “reinvent” and the phrases “staying relevant” as well as “lowering the price” should be at the top of the agendas for boards at most academic institutions of higher education throughout America (and other nations as well). I use the word most here because some folks will likely continue to pay enormous prices to get the name brands that they’ve been paying $50,000+ per year for.
If companies eventually don’t care who accredited your degree but rather what you can DO for them, watch out. The barriers to entry will plummet.
You Press the Button. Kodak Used to Do the Rest. — from technologyreview.com
Kodak saw the shift from analog to digital photography coming. Here’s why it couldn’t win.
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Excerpt (emphasis from DSC):
But the industry landscape was completely different in the digital era. Barriers to entry were significantly lowered and the industry was flooded by entrants with a background in consumer electronics, such as Casio, Samsung, and Hewlett-Packard, not to mention Japanese camera manufacturers including Canon, Nikon, and Olympus. Large parts of Kodak’s competence base related to chemistry and film manufacturing were rendered obsolete. The vertical integration that had previously been a core asset to Kodak lost its value. Digital cameras became a commodity business with low margins. The problem facing Kodak wasn’t just that film profits had died but that those revenues could not be replaced.
Once images became digital, Kodak’s business model of “doing the rest” was effectively destroyed. Doing the rest used to entail a large and complex process that only a couple of companies in the world could master. Today, it is done by the click of a button.
Related graphic from DSC:
Also see:
12/15/11 addendum re: the conversation moving away from higher ed:
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
No single blog can adequately capture or represent what was going on at Learning 2011. But if you are intrigued, I suggest you go to www.Learning2011and see what the agenda and the presentations looked like for yourself.
.What I sensed, and what I am trying to describe here, was an accelerating transition in workforce education from a higher education-centric model to a learner-workplace-centric model. In a world where higher education institutions have dominated, controlled, and driven the conversation about quality, content, access, and results; the balance of power is shifting away from that more monolithic tendency to a far more disaggregated power structure where good information, metrics, and results that can be validated against third party standards are the “coin of the realm”.
Debt to degree: A new way of measuring college success — from educationsector.org by Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon
Excerpt:
The American higher education system is plagued by two chronic problems: dropouts and debt. Barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years, and graduation rates at less-selective colleges often hover at 25 percent or less. At the same time, student loan debt is at an all-time high, recently passing credit card debt in total volume.1 Loan default rates have risen sharply in recent years, consigning a growing number of students to years of financial misery. In combination, drop-outs and debt are a major threat to the nation’s ability to help students become productive, well-educated citizens.
Gainful Employment Rule is Out: Was it Worth the Wait? — from New America Foundation
Excerpt:
Nearly a year after first proposing it, the Department of Education this morning officially issued the final version of its “Gainful Employment” Rule, which aims to stop for-profit colleges from saddling students with unmanageable levels of debt. As has been noted in numerous news stories, the Department made very large concessions to the for-profit higher education industry. As a result, the initial reaction from consumer advocacy groups has been, for the most part, lukewarm at best. Meanwhile, career college lobbyists remain — unsurprisingly — unsatisfied with the changes.
At Higher Ed Watch, we will provide our own analysis of the final regulation after we have thoroughly reviewed it. In the meantime, though, here are some helpful links to find out more about the rule, and to see what the press and various interested parties are saying about it.
Is Higher Education Ready for “The Education Bubble”? — from CampusTechnology.com by Trent Batson
Excerpts:
American higher education–the jewel in the global crown of universal education, with nearly a quarter of the total number of higher education institutions in the world, and including graduate programs that are the envy of the world–is facing the prospect of being the next bubble to burst. Technology is both a culprit and a promising ally.
The spread of information technology, and its infusion into our culture, has opened the world to learning opportunities–raising expectations for college graduates and changing the terms of success.
Is American higher education ready to either prevent the bubble from bursting or to weather the storm when it does burst? And what is the bubble?
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The bubble, as we can see by all the dimensions just described, is, in fact, a potential “perfect storm.”
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But this effort must also result from a presidential-level decree: “The learning theory that fit so well in our culture and with the dominant technology pre-1995 (print-based and paper-based technologies), now is not working very well for any of us, so we have to change. Each of you on campus has sincerely and devotedly committed yourselves fully to learning, but now we know that our learning epistemology is less and less appropriate. This is not your fault; it is simply a time of incredible human growth; it is a time of rapid evolution in our culture; a time of re-shaping our economy. We must transform or become irrelevant.”
From DSC:
Good to see I have some company in these perspectives; thanks for the article Trent. Also see:
From 5/21/09
Key education issues dividing public, college presidents, study finds — from the WSJ by Kevin Helliker
The general public and university presidents disagree about the purpose of college, who ought to pay for it and whether today’s students are getting their money’s worth.
But university presidents and the average American agree that the cost of higher education now exceeds the reach of most people.
Those are broad findings from a pair of surveys released late Sunday from the nonprofit Pew Research Center. The surveys took place this March and April, one posing college-related questions to 2,142 American adults, the other to 1,055 presidents of colleges large, small, public, private and for-profit. The two surveys contained some identical questions and some peculiar to each group.
As is the case with all Center reports, our research is not designed to promote any cause, ideology or policy proposal. Our only goal is to inform the public on important topics that shape their lives and their society.
Higher education is one such topic. The debate about its value and mission has been triggered not just by rising costs, but also by hard economic times; by changing demands on the nation’s workforce; by rising global competition; by growing pressures to reduce education funding; and by the ambitious goal set by President Obama for the United States to lead the world by 2020 in the share of young adults who have a college degree.
From DSC:
I submitted the following comment to the solid article “Fixing accreditation, from the inside” (from today’s InsideHigherEd.com posting by Doug Lederman)
Thank you for the article/posting here.
Re: the committee:
Re: higher ed as an industry:
I am a liberal arts grad and I work at a liberal arts college; as such, I believe in the value of liberal arts. However, I’ve been reflecting upon why the teaching and learning environment has been changing so much and why higher education has become more of a business.
Actually, I think it’s always been somewhat of a business, but even more so these days. The key reason for me involves the *cost* of obtaining an education.
It’s one thing to charge $3000/yr for tuition and it’s another to charge $25,000+/yr for tuition. If it means essentially having to pay the price of a house to obtain an education for your children, doesn’t the set of expectations change for students? For the parents of those students? For businesses who are helping pay the tuition of their employees?
If the accreditation bodies don’t respond to the growing suspicion towards them — and towards higher education as a whole — it will be like water going around a rock in a stream. People will flow right by them — whether the government assumes control or not.
Some great items re: whether online learning is disruptive or not
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From DSC:
For those of us in more traditional institutions of higher education, if this is where things are heading — or even if pieces of Anya’s presentation come to fruition — what is our response? Strategy?
From DSC:
As I was reviewing Mel’s presentation, I couldn’t help but think of the amazing amount of pressure colleges and universities will be under towards “standardization” — or at minimum, institutions may need to accept much of what has occurred at another school. The costs are too high not to — and the expectations from parents, students, legislatures, and the general public may force this to occur.
Along these lines, I think that the dynamics of teaching and learning change when we talk about the cost of an education going from a few thousand to 150,000+ for 4 years. Expectations are one thing that change; Mel’s presentation points to this a bit. But I also wondered…how will institutions of higher education differentiate themselves if these pressures for portability continue to build? How will they keep from becoming a commodity?
Also noteworthy was Mel’s slide re: what students can ultimately DO as a result of their educations — this may become more of the Holy Grail of Assessment.
Mend It, Don’t End It — insidehighered.com
Example slides/excerpts:
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One example — of several great slides — regarding the old vs. the new paradigm:
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From DSC:
Re: one of the bullet points on the last slide — i.e. “Faculty work as part of instructional team” — here’s my take on what that team increasingly needs to look like in order to engage our students and to compete:
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eLearning predictions for 2011 and beyond — from Web Courseworks.com by Jon Aleckson
Excerpts:
This summer I attended the 2010 Distance Teaching and Learning Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Some very interesting topics came up in the facilitated Think Tanks, and I wanted to share some of the predictions that were developed from these active group discussions regarding where eLearning will go in the next ten years.
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Below you will find a table that summarizes the different opportunities and challenges that were predicted to arise in the next ten years by the participants in the conference Think Tanks and by [Jon Aleckson].
| Opportunities | Challenges | |
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| Content |
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| Learning Environment |
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| Administration & Management |
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| International Perspectives |
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