http://edfuture.net/

 

 

Excerpt:

In countries around the world, the transition to knowledge and service economies occurring rapidly. Competitive countries are no longer only those that have an abundance of natural resources, but also those with a highly educated populace. Higher education is increasingly recognized as a vehicle for economic development [1].

University leaders are struggling to make sense of how internationalization, the current economic conditions, and new technologies will impact their systems. Educators are uncertain of the impact of open educational resources, alternative accreditation models, de-professionalization of academic positions, and increased grant competitiveness. What is role of the academy in increasing national economic competitiveness while preserving the “vital combat for lucidity” [2] that defines an open democratic society?

 

Apple TV and the transformation of web apps into tablet and TV dual screen apps — from brightcove.com by Jeremy Allaire

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Excerpts:

Importantly, designers and developers need to shed the concept that “TVs” are for rendering video, and instead think about “TVs” as large monitors on which they can render applications, content and interactivity that is supported by a touch-based tablet application.

The key concept here is that this pervasive adoption of TV monitors is the tip of the spear in creating a social computing surface in the real world.

Specifically, Apple has provided the backbone for dual screen apps, enabling:

  • Any iOS device (and OSX Mountain Lion-enabled PCs) to broadcast its screen onto a TV. Think of this as essentially a wireless HDMI output to a TV. If you haven’t played with AirPlay mirroring features in iOS and Apple TV, give it a spin, it’s a really exciting development.
  • A set of APIs and an event model for enabling applications to become “dual screen aware” (e.g. to know when a device has a TV screen it can connect to, and to handle rendering information, data and content onto both the touch screen and the TV screen).


[Jeremy listed several applications for these concepts:  Buying a house, buying a car, doctor’s office, kids edutainment, the classroom, retail electronics store, consuming news, consuming video, sales reporting, board games.]

.

Also see:

 
From DSC:
Graphically speaking — and approaching this from an educational/learning ecosystems standpoint — I call this, “Learning from the Living [Class] Room.

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The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

 

 

Learning from the living room -- a component of our future learning ecosystems -- by Daniel S. Christian, June 2012

 

 

Related item:

What universities must learn about social networks– from evolllution.com by Jay Cross and Chris Sessums; also posted at internettime.com

Excerpts:

THE ISSUE IS NOT whether you are going to become a socially networked university but how soon.

Networks are the glue that connects us. No one works alone. It takes a team to get things done. No one learns alone either. Others show us the way, share their know-how, and help us make meaning of the world. We rely on colleagues and social networks to separate the signal from the noise; their advice makes our experiential learning productive. Collaboration is the key to success in both working and learning; they usually take place simultaneously.

Universities have a mandate. Most students, faculty, and administraters use social networks extensively outside of school. They will use them with your blessing or without it. Mobile devices route around IT; amateurs can bid software slaves do their will.

Universities will transmogrify into networked universities.

Higher education used to be on deck, but is now at bat. [Christian]

 

From DSC:
My way of thinking about what’s happening to higher education these days borrows from the sport of baseball:  Higher education used to be on deck; but now, we’re at bat.

I’ve watched as the former power brokers throughout many other industries reluctantly got out of the dugout, nervously began their warm up on deck, and then timidly moved up to bat as well. They were trying to cling to the status quo. Which didn’t work.  We’ve all seen the results.  There are new power brokers in those industries now.  (Which is I why I assert that there is danger in the status quo — our organizations need to always be at the work of reinventing ourselves.)

If I had to pick the top 2 forces driving change throughout the higher education landscape, I would have to say the cost of obtaining a degree and technology-enabled innovation.

Control is an illusion; people will find a way.

 


The items below reinforced my perspectives when I saw them this morning.  They inspired me to create the above graphic, something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now.


Excerpt:

Our thesis with xEducation is that the internet is happening to higher education and that successful universities of the future will be those that find ways to generate value for its many stakeholders that go beyond content provision and teaching. What exactly that value proposition is remains unclear. On the one hand, content and (recorded) lectures can easily be shared with limited costs. The internet scales content exceptionally well. The human, social, processes of learning don’t scale. Research doesn’t scale (yet). Regional and national economic value generation doesn’t scale. In these spaces where scalability does not work well, universities will likely find their new roles in society. Over the next six months, we’ll explore and test this thesis and place the discussion of higher education reform on a firmer foundation than the latest tool and popular hype.

 

The changing face of the campus CIO - University Business September 2012

 

 

Addendums:

  • On 9/27/12 which regards the business/corporate world:
    CIO must become Chief Innovation Officer
    — from innovationexcellence.com by Linda Bernardi
    .
  • On 10/1/12:
    The question CIO’s must really ask — from cnn.com by Jeanne G. Harris, Allan E. Alter and Aarohi Sen
    Asking whether CIOs will play a strategic or supporting role is indulging in a stale debate. The more important question is whether CIOs are prepared to lead their organizations into a future environment that could be completely unlike today.
    .
  • On 10/16/12 — but moreso on the corporate side
    The New Chief Connected Officer
    — from by Gregg Garrett

Joining the brave CIO, who takes a step forward while many other IT leaders are standing still, is the motivated CEO. The adage that “it is lonely at the top” couldn’t be more true during this transition period. Most major advisors for top leadership, many of whom are part of well-recognized strategy consulting firms, understand the promise of the connected world, but aren’t pushing this advice yet.

They are putting their toes in the water with social-media practices and CMO-to-CIO forums. However, very few of them are actually broaching the sacred space of product-to-service conversations that could potentially reposition the chief information and chief technology officers to fulfill much more critical and senior roles within the organization.

The last time IT grew to such prominence in the corporate structure was the Y2K scare or the “ecommerce” movement (“brick and mortar” to “virtual”). As already discussed, “connected” is on a similar scale, if not more grandiose. A connected world both overlays a layer of relevant information-fed services on top of today’s processes, and also reformulates entire industries through disruptive innovation.

Why online education has gained revolutionary momentum — from pbs.org/mediashift by Doug Ward

Excerpt:

The rush to create large, free online classes has generated anxiety at universities around the country. With finances already tight and with a surge of movement toward online learning, universities are being forced to move quickly to change centuries-old models of learning. Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years.

Many institutions have been preparing for these changes for years, building infrastructure and expertise, experimenting and recruiting, and integrating online learning into long-term strategies. Many others, especially traditional research universities, have been caught flat-footed as education has transformed around them.

This point of dramatic — and traumatic — change didn’t swoop in unannounced. Rather, it crept in like a series of streams meeting in a roiling confluence. Only by stepping back and looking in panoramic fashion can we truly understand how we’ve arrived at a point of transformation and how we might deal with it. Let’s take a look.

College may never be the same — from USA Today by Mary Beth Marklein

Excerpt:

“The industry has operated more or less along the same business model and even the same technology for hundreds of years,” says John Nelson, managing director of Moody’s Higher Education. “MOOCS represent a rapidly developing and emerging change and that is very, very rare.”

In a new report, Moody’s Investor Service calls MOOCs a “pivotal development” that has the potential to revolutionize higher education. Questions remain whether these online courses can be profitable and whether traditional colleges will award credit for them. But if successful, MOOCs could lead to lower costs for families and access to higher-quality instruction for anyone in the world who has Internet access.

 

From DSC:
MOOCs are no doubt a very important experiment within higher education today.  It’s too early to tell what the future will bring in terms of pricing, certification/accredidation, learning effectiveness, the form(s) they may take, the corporate world’s perspective on them, etc.

However, my main point that I want to make today — September 13, 2012 — is that MOOCs provide yet another example why the question of “where’s the ROI on all of this investment in technology?” should be considered a dead question — let’s put it to rest for good.   I simply can’t take that question seriously anymore.  At minimum, MOOCs provide an extremely affordable means of gaining exposure to information and ascertaining one’s interest level in that subject. At the price of higher education these days, such knowledge of what one enjoys and would like to learn more about is worth a great deal.  MOOCs rest on the foundations set by so many other investments, technological advancements and inventions, trends, platforms, devices, and the pedagogies available to us due to these other foundational pieces.

 

Charles B. Reed, chancellor for the last 14 years of the 23-campus California State University,
the nation’s largest university system, is retiring at the end of the year.

Excerpt:

California’s public higher education system, once the envy of the world, is struggling. To survive in a way that continues to fulfill its mission, we need to break the mold on how it operates.

State budget cuts have stripped our universities to the bone. And the promise of nearly free, accessible higher education has all but disappeared as cuts have forced tuition increases. What was once a rite of passage for all qualified young people is increasingly becoming untenable for many prospective students.

Some lucky people may have the option to simply choose another university, perhaps a private institution. But many more students, particularly those from low-income and traditionally underserved backgrounds, may have no choice but to forgo a university degree. This situation has caused those of us who have spent our careers advocating for accessible public higher education to ask: Is this the direction our state — and sooner or later our country — should be taking?

 

 

Technology and the broken higher education cost model: Insights from the Delta Cost Project — from Educause by Rita Kirshstein and Jane Wellman

Excerpt:

Although U.S. higher education has faced numerous crises and dilemmas in its history, the situation in which colleges and universities find themselves at the moment is indeed different. Shrinking public subsidies coupled with historic rises in tuitions come at the same time that colleges and universities have been tasked to dramatically increase the number of individuals with postsecondary degrees. Additionally, many of these students need financial aid, putting further strains on the higher education system. The stratification between rich and poor institutions in their access to resources is also growing. These conditions make the current “cost model” under which higher education has typically operated no longer sustainable and have led to college and university leaders examining alternative ways to deliver both high-quality and affordable higher education. These alternatives incorporate technology and include access to distance-delivered education and services, a focus on learners’ outcomes rather than inputs, and technologically sophisticated buildings and classrooms.

The changes are welcome and largely overdue in much of higher education, but unless the use of technology, whether in instruction or in the operation of the institution, is guided by an understanding of higher education costs and cost structures, its use will not fix the problem of a broken higher education cost model. This problem is not confined to the way that instruction is funded and delivered; rather, it is much broader, including the costs of academic and administrative overhead and the largely unexamined “fixed costs” that drive so much of institutional spending. To implement technological innovations that can improve both efficiency and effectiveness, leaders must be guided in their efforts by a strong understanding of the impact of the innovations on both costs and revenues, as well as on learning outcomes. Without this understanding, leaders are likely to follow the usual model of innovation in higher education: implementing program add-ons, which are sometimes successful and sometimes not but which inevitably increase costs rather than replacing or reducing them and ultimately fail to take hold in ways that will leverage systemic improvements.

Debt collectors cashing in on student loans — from the New York Times by Andrew Martin

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

…many borrowers are struggling to pay off their student loans, and the debt collection industry is cashing in.

As the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has exploded, so has the number who have fallen at least 12 months behind in making payments — about 5.9 million people nationwide, up about a third in the last five years.

In all, nearly one in every six borrowers with a loan balance is in default. The amount of defaulted loans — $76 billion — is greater than the yearly tuition bill for all students at public two- and four-year colleges and universities, according to a survey of state education officials.

In an attempt to recover money on the defaulted loans, the Education Department paid more than $1.4 billion last fiscal year to collection agencies and other groups to hunt down defaulters.

 

From DSC:
Administrators throughout the country need to ask, how can we cut the price of our degrees by 50% or more?  No kidding!  I realize that sounds crazy, but if we don’t do this, cheaper — and increasingly attractive/convenient — alternatives will continue to develop. The conversation is not moving in a positive direction folks.
  There is a limit to people’s incomes and patience here.

U.S. debt $417 billion below the debt ceiling — from CNN.com by Jeanne Sahadi

Excerpt:

The debt ceiling is currently set at $16.394 trillion. At the end of August, the amount of debt subject to that limit — which excludes certain types of debt was $15.977 trillion, roughly $417 billion below the cap. Since the government typically borrows between $100 billion and $125 billion a month, that means it’s on track to hit the ceiling sometime in December. But the Treasury Department will likely be able to use “extraordinary measures” to keep the debt just below the legal limit for a couple of months.

Bottom line:
Congress will likely need to raise the ceiling in early 2013 or Treasury will risk defaulting on the country’s legal obligations by failing to pay all of its bills in full and on time.

From DSC:
At some point, if we don’t turn things around, the vast majority of our tax dollars will go to pay for interest on our debt…and. nothing. else.

 

Stanford assigns Vice Provost of Online Learning — from technapex.com by Molly Gerth

Excerpt:

This week, Stanford University announced the appointment of John Mitchell to serve as Vice Provost for Online Learning. This signifies the university is getting serious about the Stanford Online initiative to reach more students around the world and to address the transforming 21st century education system.

The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Siege of Academe [Kevin Carey]

Excerpt:

The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online. The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number of students into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether. It may also be an existential threat to institutions that have long played a crucial role in American life.

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From DSC:
If higher ed doesn’t respond more forcefully/significantly to the perfect storm it finds itself in, people will find other ways of getting employed and staying employed. The conversation continues to move away from institutions of traditional higher education (here’s but one example). Control is an illusion.

The middle class falls further behind -- part of the perfect storm for higher ed in the US

 

From DSC:
Along with a host of other trends, this is a piece of the perfect storm in higher ed. People will find a way to make a living — whether this involves “traditional” higher education or not. From a career development side of things, robotics may make these graphics even more pronounced as jobs move from being done by humans to jobs being done by robots.

Also see:

 

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Addendums:

 

© 2024 | Daniel Christian