Born Digital: Meet the college class of 2017 — from Yahoo! News by Liz Goodwin
Excerpt:
Here are some of the emerging trends that may come to define the class of 2017.
Also see:
OPINION: How to make college better & more affordable — from edsurge.com by Paul Freedman
One powerful answer: Reform the accreditation process
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
How can our diverse, 4,300 two- and four-year schools collectively be failing to produce the outcomes we need, at the scale we need them, all at the same time?
How can this be?
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…why have these solutions not yet driven the fundamental change the system needs? Innovators that could bring costs down and help our system stay on the leading-edge are being stifled by little-known organizations that possess tremendous unregulated power in higher education: accreditors. As a result, our system is sick–plagued by an institutionalized lack of adaptation.
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If they are indeed stewards of the public trust responsible for ensuring the quality of our higher education system, then they are also responsible for its outcomes and therefore share a large portion of the blame for the failures in higher education that we see today. Accreditation is the one constant across all US higher education institutions.
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The problem? Ivy Bridge wanted to change the status quo.
Also see:
A relevant side note from DSC:
The following statement in Downgrading Elite Colleges (InsideHigherEd.com) shows the impact of this straitjacketing, status quo situation (emphasis mine):
“We do see pressure on small private colleges as a group and that’s primarily because they don’t have a lot of different things they can do, so they are primarily dependent on tuition revenue,” said a Moody’s analyst, Edie Behr.
Moody’s advises institutions to try to diversify their revenue streams.
That is not an easy task, said Oberlin’s vice president for finance, Ronald Watts.
From DSC:
If the entire boat is sinking, does it matter what your peers are doing?!? Isn’t it time for bigger thinking? Bolder thinking? More (and careful/well-thought-through) experimentation?
Paul Freedman states this as well in his article:
I have heard people in the industry compare the current state of higher education to a sinking ship. If that is accurate, then accreditors should be viewed as the ones who are literally nailing down the deck chairs to the Titanic. We need to keep the students we are all dedicated to serving from going down with the ship. We, as the education industry and as US citizens, need to fight for accreditation reform.
I ask these questions and pose the above picture not to promote panic — but rather to strongly encourage change. Institutions of higher education need to adapt in order to stay relevant, survive, and to properly equip future generations for the world they will be entering.
If not, students will find other ways to be successful — and so will corporations.
Addendum on 9/3/13:
Obama’s Ratings for Higher Ed — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
WASHINGTON — President Obama appears to be making good on his vow to propose a “shake-up” for higher education.
Early Thursday, he released a plan that would:
- Create a new rating system for colleges in which they would be evaluated based on various outcomes…
- Link student aid to these ratings…
- Create a new program that would give colleges a “bonus” if they enroll large numbers of students eligible for Pell Grants.
- Toughen requirements on students receiving aid.
The White House also said President Obama is “challenging” colleges to “adopt one or more” of practices he called “promising” to “offer breakthroughs on cost, quality or both.” Among them: competency-based learning that moves away from seat time, course redesign (including massive open online courses), the use of technology for student services, and more efforts to recognize prior learning.
Also see:
What happened in online learning over the summer? – 2 — by Tony Bates
Excerpt:
MOOCs
Peters, M. (2013) Massive Open Online Courses and Beyond: the Revolution to Come Truthout, August 17
This is an excellent, comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of where MOOCs are going.
What Michael Peters does is to set MOOCs within ‘a wider set of socio-technological changes that might be better explained within a theory of postindustrial education focusing on social media as the new culture.‘
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Also see:
Moody’s report forecasts a gloomy future for public universities — from insidehighered.com by Eric Kelderman
Excerpt:
Moody’s analysis of median fiscal data from 2012 show that enrollment at public colleges was essentially flat, revenues grew less than 2 percent, and expenses increased more than 3 percent—nearly twice as fast as inflation.
Also see:
From DSC:
I originally saw this out at Building the Future of Learning Site [cogdogblog.com]. Several words/concepts caught my eye:
Addendum on 8/16/13:
- Water106: A cMOOC-like approach to issues-based education (now with whitepaper!) — from hapgood.us by Mike Caulfield
Twitter buys open source training company Marakana to power new “Twitter University” for engineers — from techcrunch.com by Ingrid Lunden
Excerpt:
Twitter today announced its latest acquisition, along with a move into offering richer resources to attract better engineering talent to the company. It has bought Marakana, an open-source technical training company; and in turn, Marakana will be the force behind a new effort called Twitter University. School mascot: a blue bird, not a whale.
From DSC:
I’ve asked from time to time if the corporate world would develop their own MOOCs…
I’ve suggested that if higher ed doesn’t get much more responsive to the needs of business — as well as to our government — alternatives may likely crop up….
…so I can’t help but wondering if this isn’t an example of that very type of thing occurring (i.e. the corporate world developing alternative paths to getting what they need).
It may not be MOOCs, but disruption will occur one way or another if higher ed doesn’t experiment and innovate with a much greater degree of intensity and fervency. We need to be far more responsive!
The items in this posting are a great illustration of why I call this blog, Learning Ecosystems — how we learn and what we learn about is an ecosystem — both individually and corporately. We have self-organizing systems for learning that constantly change — involving people, institutions, technologies, and more. Very few things are staying in place/the same these days — and the very pace of change has changed. If we were to look at our learning ecosystems through a gigantic “microscope”, the organisms and nodes would be very active these days!
Also see:
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Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
To fix its problem, McAfee turned to a concept sweeping the education scene: Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. By using a tenet of MOOCs called “flipping the classroom,” which means that the majority of learning happens not with a professor lecturing the students but by giving students access to course materials and having them probe, discuss, and debate issues with fellow learners as well as the professor. With that change, McAfee turned its training around in a way that both saved both time and produced more lucrative sales: its sales associates now attribute an average of $500,000 per year in sales to the skills they learned through the new training model.
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But as MOOCs storm the academic world, the public discussion of their impact is ignoring what could become their most valuable application. Far from being limited to higher education reform, the new learning style’s most important legacy could be its impact on the world of corporate training – which is a $150 billion industry.
No surprise: Accrediting agency opts to stunt innovation — from disruptingclass.mhprofessional.com by Clayton Christensen
Excerpts:
Several years ago I offered words of praise when Tiffin College partnered with Altius Education to create Ivy Bridge College, a two-year online institution dedicated to providing an affordable higher education option that boosted the transfer rate of two-year students to four-year institutions.
The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the accrediting body for the North Central region and thus this partnership because Tiffin College is located in an Ohio city that was once populated with industry, agreed strongly, as in 2010 it approved continuing accreditation for Tiffin University and Ivy Bridge College through 2020. At the time, the HLC lauded the partnership.
In the last few weeks, everything changed.
From DSC:
What needs to be done to force accreditation bodies to change who can be on these accreditation teams? Why is it that the people that institutions of higher education claim to serve can’t be on such boards? i.e. one must be an “insider” to the higher education industry, but not an “outsider?”
Pursuing the current status quo may have a serious backfiring effect when alternatives present themselves. In fact, taking steps to insure the status quo only serves to put more energy behind MOOCs and puts yet more heat in higher ed’s kitchen. I would hope that folks inside higher ed would take the steps to allow for more experimentation and innovation and to take some heat out of the kitchen.
The key, he added, was to try to avoid mistakes like those made by the music industry on its road to iTunes. “This is a Napster moment for education,” he said. “It’s a big opportunity and an existential threat.”
The Lesson of Commoditization: From The Washington Post to Higher Education — from LinkedIn.com by Jeff Selingo
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
You have to ask yourself whether you’re inherently a commodity business or inherently an innovation business.
— A.G. Lafley, CEO Procter & Gamble
Many colleges face the same problem The Washington Post does, and of course, they charge thousands of dollars more for their product. The owners of The Post realized that they needed to get out of the commodity business and into the innovation business, and there was no better person to lead the newspaper through that transformation than Jeff Bezos.
…figure out what is truly innovative and different about the campus experience, double down on that and let other players with less expensive models serve the commodity market. In the end, don’t be afraid of putting a piece of what you do now out of business.
From DSC:
That last sentence speaks directly to what Steve Jobs believed and lived by:
If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.
The future is now: 15 innovations to watch for — from chronicle.com by By Steven Mintz
Excerpt:
But the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students consume higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including from early-college/dual-degree programs, community colleges, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are voting with their feet, embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language.
As a result, colleges must become more nimble, entrepreneurial, student-focused, and accountable for what students learn. I am a historian and far better at interpreting the past than forecasting the future. Nevertheless, I will go out on a limb and predict 15 innovations that will alter the face of higher education over the next 36 months…
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Technology in the Future — from strategy-keys.com by David Willden
What will be the technology in the future? According to the Global Trends 2030 report, the areas below should continue to be key technology drivers through 2030.
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A glimpse into the future of learning: An infographic — from knowledgeworks.org
Excerpt:
This infographic tells the big story of KnowledgeWorks’ third forecast on the future of learning, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Future of Learning. Comprised of twelve key insights with accompanying graphics, it points the way toward a diverse learning ecosystem in which learning adapts to each child instead of each child trying to adapt to school.
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Quantum boost for artificial intelligence — from nature.com by Devin Powell
Quantum computers able to learn could attack larger sets of data than classical computers.
Excerpt:
Quantum computers of the future will have the potential to give artificial intelligence a major boost, a series of studies suggests.
Futuring in the year 2100 by Glen Hiemstra, Futurist.com — by Futurist Glen Hiemstra
Glen Hiemstra, Founder of Futurist.com, presents a program on Futuring in the year 2100. The presentation was a part of a series taking an early look at the 22nd Century, as a feature of the annual meeting of the World Future Society, Chicago, July 2013. As part of the program Glen solicited input from other professional futurists, a sample of which are presented in the slide deck. [note: slide 34 was a video of Elon Musk receiving the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award]
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What is the future of technology in education? — from guardian.co.uk by Matt Britland
Forget devices, the future of education technology is all about the cloud and anywhere access. In the future, teaching and learning is going to be social, says Matt Britland
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‘Shake Up’ for Higher Ed — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik
Excerpt:
President Obama vowed Wednesday that he would soon unveil a plan to promote significant reform in higher education — with an emphasis on controlling what colleges charge students and families.
“[I]n the coming months, I will lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for middle-class students and their families. It is critical that we make sure that college is affordable for every single American who’s willing to work for it,” said Obama, in a speech at Knox College.
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“Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money, to keep up with costs that are going up 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for,” Obama said.
From DSC:
At a $175 billion per year support for postsecondary education, if the Federal Government starts redirecting this flow of $$$…I’ll bet we’ll see some change…and rather quickly I might add.
The Walmart of Education (as predicted back in December 2008) is now here, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. To what will we change? At least one major piece of the answer to that question is that we will see the continued — but increasing — use of teams of specialists that will be commissioned to create low-cost, highly-engaging content. Though expensive to create originally, such teams will more than make their money back because of the massive number of students such “courses” will serve.
From the Walmart of Education page on 4/11/09:
…I wanted to offer another idea that might help fund engaging, multimedia-based, online-based learning materials:
(NOTE: The figures I use are not accurate, but rather, they are used for illustration purposes only.)Let’s reallocate funds towards course development, and then let’s leverage those learning materials throughout the world!
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For students: Bring costs waaaayyyyy down and access waaayyy up!
Plus, no more defaulted loans, students could experience richer content, students wouldn’t have to wait as much on financial aid decisions. There would be fewer financial aid headaches; and the resources devoted to figuring out & processing financial aid could be reduced. The issue will be how an institution can differentiate itself in such a new world…but that issue will have to be dealt with in the future anyway.
The Coming Crossroads in Higher Education: Remarks of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association Annual Meeting, July 9, 2013 — from distance-educator.com with thanks going out to Mr. John Shank for Scooping this item.
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
But I would also make the case to you today that higher education is approaching a crossroads, where leaders will be asked to choose between incremental and transformational change.
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Polls show that three out of four Americans believe—and I quote—”to get ahead in life these days, it is necessary to get a college education.” At the same time, three in four Americans also believe that college today is too expensive for most people to afford. That fundamental gap—between aspirations and opportunity—is one we must close.
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I believe that higher education is at a crossroads because our current model of student and institutional aid is ultimately unsustainable. It is incapable of meeting the bipartisan goal that President Obama articulated four years ago—that America will again lead the world in college attainment by 2020.
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Speaking in broad-brush terms, I believe we will see two ideas take hold in response to these threats to higher education.
The first response is that the system of state and federal institutional grants and loans will start to shift more toward a performance-based and outcomes-based system than is the case today—and one that does more to reward innovation.
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The federal government currently provides more than $175 billion a year to postsecondary institutions and students through grants, loans, and direct school support. But together we must do a better job of defining and linking aid to satisfactory academic progress, meaningful institutional performance, and student learning outcomes.
We absolutely must continue to invest in higher education. But we must also use taxpayer dollars more wisely.
This shift in the direction of performance-based funding is already underway.
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Further evidence of the policy shift underway is that many states—including Indiana, Tennessee, Oregon, and Missouri—are moving in bipartisan fashion to incorporate elements of performance-based funding in higher education.
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Now, if the first response to the challenges of cost, completion, and accountability is likely to be more performance-based funding and new incentives for innovation, a second response is likely to be a leveraging of educational technology to increase student learning as well as institutional performance and productivity.
We still have a lot to learn and perfect about online learning, MOOCs, simulations and gaming, and other uses of educational technology. But there is no question that a digital revolution is already underway in higher education. And its vast potential has only begun to be tapped.
From DSC:
I hear a lot about resistance to change; in fact, as I come from the tech side of the academic house, I experience it on an ongoing basis.
But I do wonder if the pace of change within higher education might accelerate when more of that $175 billion a year starts flowing elsewhere…?
