From DSC:
Another slide mentioned the importance of asking:
- What’s changed?
- What assumptions are people making that are no longer true?
- Why does everything feel like it’s speeding up?
People in higher ed would be wise to ask these questions.
College presidents predict 4 new institutional models for higher-ed — from ecampusnews.com by Meris Stansbury
Presidents say these new models could be the future of all colleges and universities in the next decade
Excerpt:
A new think-tank-esque collection of leading college and university presidents last year came together to discuss the trends and disruptions shaping higher education thanks to new technologies and the evolving global economy. Outside of just naming trends, they also predicted four new models of higher-ed that may exist in the next 10 years.
The brainstorming made formal can be found in a new series of papers called the Presidential Innovation Lab (PIL) White Paper Series, funded as part of a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and hosted by the American Council on Education (ACE).
14 chief executive officers from a diverse group of institutions participated in two separate sessions last year (2013)—institutions such as Northeastern University, MIT, Western Governors University, etc.—with the goal of engaging in a “robust and wide-ranging conversation about the various drivers of change and potential reactions to those drivers.”
Ed-Tech advances poised to revolutionize higher ed from all angles — from evolllution.com by Michael Horn
Excerpt:
There’s a flip side to unbundling, however, that receives far less attention. As a service’s architecture becomes modular, its performance becomes determined by the raw performance of its subcomponents, which consequently become interdependent — or re-bundled — as the entities making these subcomponents need to wring every ounce of performance out of them. In other words, as one stage becomes modular, an adjacent stage becomes interdependent.
In education, as elements such as content become unbundled, there will exist a need for subcomponents that bundle together — coaching, mentoring, communities, personal learning plans and employer connections, for example, as these areas are critical for student success, but the ways in which they fit together are not yet well enough understood such that there can be clear standards at their various interfaces. Standalone, modular solutions in these areas will struggle to succeed. Creating standards at their interfaces before we know what the standards should be will similarly suffer.
..
Similarly, too few are thinking about how to help students make sense of and navigate this emerging, unbundled world and integrate the modular pieces together in ways that help them carve out a coherent and sensible life path. This is critical because it appears that in a personalized learning future, every single learner will have a custom-fit educational pathway.
Bundling and Re-bundling — from elearnspace.com by George Siemens
Excerpt:
There are a few things wrong with the idea of unbundling in education:
1. Unbundling is different in social systems than it is in a content only system. An album can be unbundled without much loss. Sure, albums like The Wall don’t unbundle well, but those are exceptions. Unbundling a social system has ripple effects that cannot always be anticipated. The parts of a social system are less than the whole of a social system. Unbundling, while possible in higher education, is not a zero sum game. The pieces on the board that get rearranged will have a real impact on learners, society, and universities.
2. When unbundling happens, it is only temporary. Unbundling leads to rebundling. And digital rebundling results in less players and less competition. What unbundling represents then is a power shift. Universities are today an integrated network of products and services. Many universities have started to work with partners like Pearson (ASU is among the most prominent) to expand capacity that is not evident in their existing system.
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Rebundling is what happens when the pieces that are created as a sector moves online become reintegrated into a new network model. It is most fundamentally a power shift. The current integrated higher education system is being pulled apart by a range of companies and startups. Currently the university is in the drivers seat. Eventually, the unbundled pieces will be integrated into a new network model that has a new power structure. For entrepreneurs, the goal appears to be to become part of a small number of big winners like Netflix or Google. When Sebastian Thrun stated that Udacity would be one of only 10 universities in the future, he was exhibiting the mentality that has existed in other sectors that have unbundled. Unbundling is not the real story: the real issue is the rebundling and how power structures are re-architected. Going forward, rebundling will remove the university from the drivers seat and place the control into the re-integrated networks.
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Addendums:
Addendum on 9/17/14:
Ed tech’s next wave rolls into view — from by Roger Novak
Excerpt:
If the second wave was about the unbundling of colleges and providing learning as a service, the third wave of companies will be involved in reassembling educational component pieces from various sources to help make students’ learning portfolios more meaningful to both individuals and employers. While we are starting to see colleges taking similar steps to become more student-centered, private-sector companies can act nimbly to fill gaps and create new technologies to help accomplish these goals.
Excerpt:
“We’re not going to see bachelor’s programs in English, math, history, sociology, chemistry and all of those fields that are traditional liberal arts fields,” said Constance Carroll, Chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, and a member of the California Community College Baccalaureate Degree Study Group. “What we will see are baccalaureate programs in workforce fields where there is high demand.”
Fields like dental hygiene, information technology, and automotive-technology management.
How do you plan the campus of the future? Try not to. — from chronicle.com by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Excerpts:
“My goal as the dean is to create an environment where everything can be repurposed,” Mr. Huttenlocher says.
He and his team are in the tenuous middle stages of planning and building exactly that: the chameleon campus, a space where interchangeability permeates everything. As Cathy Dove, Cornell Tech’s founding vice president, puts it, “We want to embody the principle of iteration.”
…
“How do you do something that’s technologically advanced that isn’t immediately technologically dated?”
To ask it another way, how do you create a new institution in an age where everything—office design, intelligent infrastructure, cloud computing, classroom technology—presents some opportunity to break with the past? What do you build? What do you wire? What kind of interactions do you encourage? Some institutions might create committees to try to anticipate specific changes. Cornell Tech is determined to do the opposite. Those responsible for building the campus of the future won’t pretend to know what the future holds. They only hope they’re building something malleable enough to handle it.
The July-August 2014 issue of THE FUTURIST is FREE online, as part of WorldFuture 2014: What If.
Excerpt:
Creating a Future Forward College: What If. … Collaborations in Transformational Learning — by Benita Budd, Magdalena de la Teja, Butch Grove, and Rick Smyre
Imagine a college classroom where the professor asks students to review the course requirements and then decide, as a group, how to meet those requirements. Imagine the lively discussions as students take ownership of their learning, and the questions to the professor when information becomes “necessary” to the projects. Imagine the professor coaching, guiding, and inspiring each student or group as they need to be uniquely inspired; imagine guest experts visiting the class to mentor and assist; imagine the shift in thinking from “receivers of knowledge” to “creators of knowledge.”
You’ve just imagined a DNA shift in education. And it’s happening now, in Wake Technical Community College’s Future Forward classrooms and at Tarrant County College, through its initiatives supporting transformational learning and its FFC Innovation Forum idea incubator.
…
A time of constant change always hides a developing narrative that often slips past our awareness. The trick is to find the “weak signals” of a new idea in its early stages; then we can witness its development as a force from our position on the cutting edge of thinking and action. Our challenge is to understand what may be occurring and to build collaborative networks, futures projects, and pilot programs that exist in parallel with conventional models and serve as harbingers of a world and society that do not yet exist. The narrative of an emerging Future Forward College is one of these forces pushing the change.
We are shifting from the rigid forms of hierarchies, standard answers, and predictability to an evolving society of interlocking networks, varied solutions, and the need to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. And we have no models to follow as we explore this unprecedented transformation from an Industrial to an Organic Society.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of education. It is as if we are stepping off the cliff of a comfortable past and falling into an unknown abyss, full of false expectations, failing students, accelerating dropout rates, and paths leading to dead ends. And if we ask for guides to help us with direction, we often hear, “look in the literature,” or “this must occur for your college to be accredited.” Somehow, in this time of exponential change, it makes little sense to look to the past for direction in order to be accredited in increasingly obsolete ideas and methods.
…the following principles are core to the idea of a Future Forward College:
- Trans-disciplinary Thinking
- Complex Adaptive Systems
- Adaptive Planning
- And/both parallel processes
- Identifying Emerging Weak Signals
- Master Capacity Builders
- Resilience Centered
The seven habits of highly effective digital enterprises — from mckinsey.com by Tunde Olanrewaju, Kate Smaje, and Paul Willmott
To stay competitive, companies must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses. Here are seven habits that successful digital enterprises share.
Excerpt:
The age of experimentation with digital is over. In an often bleak landscape of slow economic recovery, digital continues to show healthy growth. E-commerce is growing at double-digit rates in the United States and most European countries, and it is booming across Asia. To take advantage of this momentum, companies need to move beyond experiments with digital and transform themselves into digital businesses. Yet many companies are stumbling as they try to turn their digital agendas into new business and operating models. The reason, we believe, is that digital transformation is uniquely challenging, touching every function and business unit while also demanding the rapid development of new skills and investments that are very different from business as usual. To succeed, management teams need to move beyond vague statements of intent and focus on “hard wiring” digital into their organization’s structures, processes, systems, and incentives.
From DSC:
“The age of experimentation with digital is over. … To take advantage of this momentum, companies need to move beyond experiments with digital and transform themselves into digital businesses.”
Though this may be true for the corporate world (the audience for whom this piece was written), the experimentation within higher education is just beginning. With that said, I still couldn’t help but wonder if some of these same habits might apply to the world of higher education. For example, three habits that the article mentioned jumped out at me as being highly relevant to those of us working within higher education:
1. Be unreasonably aspirational
4. Challenge everything
7. Be obsessed with the customer
Rising customer expectations continue to push businesses to improve the customer experience across all channels. Excellence in one channel is no longer sufficient; customers expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa.
A potentially-related item, at least from the perspective of the higher ed student of the near future: