From DSC:
Whereas:

  • The Walmart of Education continues and higher ed finds itself in a game-changing environment
  • The pace of change continues to accelerate
  • Disruptive innovations continue to poke at the higher education bubble
  • There is danger in the status quo
  • We all need to constantly reinvent ourselves and our organizations in order to remain relevant…

…institutions of higher education would be wise to significantly increase the priority of experimentation on their campuses during 2013.  This might take the form of creating smaller, more nimble organizations within their overall universities or colleges, or it might be experimenting with new business models, or it might be identifying/experimenting with promising educational technologies or new pedagogies, etc.  I will have several blog postings re: experimentation — and potential things to try out — during 2013; so stay tuned.

Whether we are staff, faculty, or administration, change is coming our way in 2013.  So starting today, get involved with further innovations and experiments on your campus — don’t be a roadblock or you will likely find your institution eventually becoming irrelevant. As Steve Jobs did/believed, cannibalize your own organization before someone else does.

 

The pace has changed significantly and quickly

 

Combine the trends listed in this graphic:

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Trends-ReportFromDeptOfEdu-2012

— from The Economics of Higher Education, Dec 2012 (pg 2)

 

…with the next several graphics…

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Surging college costs price out middle class -- from CNNMoney.com on June 13, 2011

 

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The middle class falls further behind

 

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Daniel S. Christian: My concerns with just maintaining the status quo (from 2009).

From 5/21/09

 

 

…and you can see that the Perfect Storm in Higher Ed has been amassed.  Massive change is in the air. People will find a way to achieve their goals/objectives — one way or another. College is still a good call — but what “college” and “university life” will look like in 5 years will likely be very different from what they look like today.

There is no returning to the “good ol’ days” — things are not going back to the way they were 5-10 years ago.  It’s time for massive — but controlled/intentional — experimentation within higher ed, to find out how best to use the Internet in order to promote learning (and, hopefully, to still make a living!).

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asdfsadf

 

 

 


Some examples that illustrate that change is in the air…and that the conversation continues to move outside traditional institutions of higher education (I mention these not to dog higher ed, but to get us to innovate, to reinvent ourselves, and to stay relevant!)


 

Big idea 2013: College becomes optional — from LinkedIn.com by Ben Smith

Jailbreaking the degree: The end of the 4 year diploma — from onlineuniversities.com by Justin Marquis

Excerpt:

What’s wrong with getting a college degree? According to the grassroots movement, “Jailbreaking the Degree,” being pushed by radical education startup Degreed.com, quite a bit. The organization has identified several fundamental flaws with the long standing college degree process. It aims to overcome them and dramatically change the nature of learning and credentialing in the process. In order to justify their initiative they present some dramatic numbers on their website…

Degreed wants to jailbreak the college degree — from techcrunch.com by Rip Empson

Saying no to college — NYT.com by Alex Williams

Do a Google search on uncollege.org and see what you get

The rise of college alternatives— from huffingtonpost.com by Dan Schawbel

educreations.com: Teach what you know. Learn what you don’t.

Higher education and the fiscal threat -- from The Parthenon Group - November 2012

 

Addendum on 12/14/12:

  • Big construction costs, MOOC disruption mean ominous cocktail for higher ed — from educationdive.com by Davide Savenije
    Dive Summary:

    • After years of aggressive expansion efforts, higher education is facing the consequences — according to Moody’s, overall debt levels for rated institutions more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 while donations and investments shrank by more than 40% relative to the debt.
    • While debt has swiftly reached a tipping point for universities, they are not alone —  the total amount of student debt currently exceeds $1 trillion and nearly one in every six borrowers’ student loan balance is in default.
    • Experts and school officials are predicting an imminent reshaping of the field of higher education — Harvard’s annual fiscal report claims “the need for change is clear” as institutions face a decreased “ability to generate […] new resources”.
    • As prospective students become aware of the decreasing value of the higher ed degree, the sudden emergence of MOOCs are becoming an increasingly viable and economically-friendly alternative.

 

From DSC:
We had better step up the pace of innovating/experimenting – and move to do so quickly. But the problem is, moving quickly is not in the cultures of most of the more traditional institutions of higher education.

 

Also relevant:

Citing IT skills shortage, IBM wants to expand presence at universities — from wiredacademic.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

“We want to be the scale up partner of choice for these universities,” said Jim Sporher, head of IBM’s university programs. “We want to make sure they have access to technology and understand our strategy.”  He also sees massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a mega-trend and will be considering ways for IBM to be part of the MOOC trend in the future, particularly as many of the MOOC providers such as Udacity and Coursera offer classes in computer science.

As a big blue-chip progenitor of the tech industry, IBM is worth listening to in many regards. For one, corporate computing trends often filter down into the education space. The corporate world often has the money to purchase and deploy game-changing technologies. IBM sees that it also works the other way too, where computing at the university level creates new businesses and ideas that move up into the corporate realm.

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From DSC:
I wonder…will the corporations develop their own MOOCs?  Their own digital “playlists” and associated exams? (i.e. that someone needs to go through and pass in order to work for them…show me what you can do.)  Hmmm…

Also see:

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McKinsey and Company -- Education to Employment -- An executive summary

 

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Also see:

 

The Future of TV -- an infographic from Beesmart

 

From DSC:
The educational “store” part of this graphic could take several forms:

  • Online-based exchanges between buyers and sellers (teachers/professors and learners) — professors as their own brand
  • Institutional offerings/brands
  • Team-based content from newly-developed firms, organizations
  • Each of us puts up our own learning materials for others to take (for free or for a price)
  • Other

 

Excerpt from edSurge’s 12-4-12 newsletter:

SO HOW WAS THAT MOOC FOR YA? First come the MOOCs, then come the reviews. First out of the box: Founded just six months ago, Knollop is a Yelp-like review and discovery site for MOOCs. It boasts courses from nine MOOCs: including Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard, as well as favorites like edX, Udacity, and Coursera.

But Knollop has competition. A mere seven weeks ago, serial entrepreneur Jesse Spaulding (LunchTree, FourTonight) launched a rival site called CourseTalk. While CourseTalk features many of the same features as Knollop, it lists just 276 courses to Knollop’s 2,835.

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From DSC, some examples:

  • Unbundling and Unmooring: Technology and the Higher Ed Tsunami — from educause.org by Audrey Watters
  • Unbundling Higher Education | From the Bell Tower –– from lj.libraryjournal.com by Steven Bell
    Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
    Recent events in higher education suggest a new trend — earning degrees by the course from multiple providers. Are we looking at the iTunes model of unbundled higher ed? Call it alt-HE.
  • Napster, Udacity, and the Academy — from Clay Shirky
    Excerpt:
    Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
    .
    It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

    But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.

 

 

Excerpt:

With the public’s continued focus on value and affordability, higher education finds itself at a critical juncture. Cost pressures and increased global demand for access have given rise to innovations that have unleashed new delivery models into the education marketplace. Such innovation is required if universities are to thrive, compete, and bring new relevance and meaning to the value of college in the 21st century.

Also see:

  • Americans believe higher education must innovate — from Northeastern News
  • President: Witt must adapt to survive — from springfieldnewssun.com by Tom Stafford
    Excerpt:
    Liberal arts colleges that ignore market realities “absolutely won’t exist in the next decade,” Wittenberg University President Laurie M. Joyner told Springfield Rotarians on Monday.  But the practical or applied liberal arts education that she predicts can sustain Wittenberg will encourage deeper connections with Springfield, she said while speaking at the Hollenbeck-Bayley Conference Center, because “our students learn better when dealing with real-world problems.” A shrinking pool of price-sensitive high school graduates has combined with a bad economy to produce “the equivalent of a perfect storm for some of us,” said Joyner, who succeeded Mark Erickson on July 1.
  • Surviving disruption — from hbr.og by Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen
    Excerpt:
    …to meet disrupters with disruption of their own, but also to guide their legacy businesses toward as healthy a future as possible.
  • Sanjay Sarma appointed as MIT’s first director of digital learning — from MIT by Steve Bradt
    Mechanical engineering professor will shepherd efforts to integrate elements of online education into traditional MIT courses.

From DSC:
Experimentation. Innovation. Experimentation. Innovation. Fail. Fail. Succeed. Fail. Succeed. Fail. 

 

The education giant adapts — from MIT Technology Review by Jessica Leber
Pearson is the world’s largest book publisher. Now it wants to be a one-stop shop for digital education.

Excerpt:

Pearson pulled this off with a decade-long string of acquisitions that helped it shift its emphasis from selling books to selling education services. The London-based company styles itself as the “world’s leading learning company,” even if that learning isn’t delivered through traditional books. These days, Pearson is more like an IT department for classrooms and schools. It sells technology infrastructure, software, and consulting services to schools—services that in turn help deliver the vast stock of textbook content Pearson owns. The company says its revenue from online content and services will surpass those of the traditional publishing business this year.

From DSC:
I congratulate Pearson on reinventing itself.  The words of Steve Jobs ring in my mind…something about cannibalizing one’s business before someone else does it for you.  Several other words and phrases come to my mind after seeing the above article — that regular readers of this blog and my archived website will instantly recognize:

  • Dangers of the status quo
  • Staying relevant
  • Survival
  • Disruption/change
  • New business models
  • Game-changing environment
  • Using teams of specialists

Also relevant here/see:

 

How to disrupt yourself — from innovationexcellence.com by Greg Satell

Excerpts:

However, disruptive innovation happens in the face of no such threat, but when things are going great. Operations are profitable, the needs of the most demanding customers are being met and the business press applauds the company’s thoughtful and visionary leadership.

Then comes along something like Google or Netflix or social media and everything is turned upside down.

That’s what makes disruptive innovation so dangerous and so interesting. It upends an existing order that seems to be working well. The reality is that incumbent firms tend to get better and [better] at things people care less about. Eventually, the basis of competition will change and old metrics of success become useless.

The biggest innovation pitfall is falling into the myth of the mad scientist. People often assume it comes from the work of a lone genius – a Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison – who works behind closed doors and then one day comes out and shouts “Eureka!”

In actuality, innovation is combination. It most often arises through active collaboration among people with diverse skills and perspectives. That’s why so few enterprises can do it effectively. Large organizations breed conformity, strong leaders encourage a singular vision and don’t like to incorporate ideas that are off-script.

 

College crackup and the online future — from bloomberg.com by Mark C. Taylor

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College Crackup

Illustration by Keith Shore

Excerpt:

In the coming decade, emerging technologies will thoroughly transform higher education. Although distance learning and computer-assisted education have been around since the 1960s, financial pressures are forcing institutions to develop aggressive online programs.

These practical considerations shouldn’t overshadow one of the most promising innovations that online education will bring: The very structure of knowledge will change.

As students mix and match courses online, pressure will increase for professors to develop classes that integrate different approaches and disciplines.

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Also see:

 

From DSC:
Creating “Innovation Labs” within each institution of higher education sounds like a good idea to me…we can experiment with things at smaller scales and see what works and what doesn’t.

Also see:
Take a lesson from Apple: A strategy to keep customers in your ecosystem — from forbes.com by Alonzo Canada

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

1.     Set focused, strategic targets.
2.     Create a portfolio of experiments. Like Apple or Mercedes Benz, once you have focused, strategic targets set, create a series of experiments.  A general rule of thumb is the 7-2-1 rule:  one experiment should be big and relatively safe.  Two experiments should be slightly more risky and moderately sized.  Then seven experiments should be highly risky and low cost. These experiments can be scaled accordingly across teams, business units, and the entire company. 3M is one of the first companies to mandate that its employees spend 20% of their time thinking up blue sky ideas beyond its current lines of business and this is how Post-It Notes were born.  Art Fry, an engineer at 3M wanted to find a better way to manage notes in his hymnal on Sundays at church.
3.    Leverage learnings to inform new experiments.

 

 

 

Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States

Excerpt:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.

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From DSC:
Another steps towards:

 

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

 

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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com

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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young

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Welcome to Star Scholar U 2

Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.

 

Excerpt:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.

Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.

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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Excerpt:

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Also see:

 

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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan

Excerpt:

The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.

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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo

Excerpt:

Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.

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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective

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How should teaching change in the age of Siri?– from MindShift

Excerpt:

 Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.

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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.

But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.

 

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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz

 

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Excerpt:

Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.

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Which brings me to this graphic:

 

asdfsadf

 

Also see:

 

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