Reinvent the future– an excellent presentation by Professor Steven Van Belleghem


From DSC:
Though this presentation is aimed at the corporate world, there are NUMEROUS lessons here for those of us working within the world of higher education.


 

AreYouReadyToRe-InventTheFuture-SVanBelleghamFeb2014

 

Sample slides:

 

ReinventYourFuture1-StephenVanBelleghem

 

ReinventYourFuture3-StephenVanBelleghem

 

ReinventYourFuture4-StephenVanBelleghem

 

 


From DSC:
This type of presentation prompts me to ask why there isn’t more coursework being offered involving futurism…?

And within our current business offerings, are we applying enough emphasis on freelancing, entrepreneurship, innovation, and in pulse-checking a variety of landscapes?

Along these lines, see:

Need a job? Invent it — from nytimes.com by Thomas Friedman

Excerpts:

Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

So what should be the focus of education reform today?

We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”

 


 

Free online university receives accreditation, in time for graduating class of 7  — from nytimes.com by Tamar Lewin

Excerpt:

Just in time for its first graduates, the University of the People, a tuition-free four-year-old online institution built to reach underserved students around the world, announced Thursday that it had received accreditation.

“This is every exciting, especially for the students who will graduate in April, with a degree from an accredited institution,” said Shai Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur who invested millions of dollars to create the nonprofit university. “This has been the big question for anyone who thought about enrolling. We have 1.2 million supporters on Facebook, I think second only to Harvard, and every day, there is discussion about when we will be accredited.”

Now, with accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council, a national accrediting group, Mr. Reshef said, the university will expand significantly. He expects to have 5,000 students by 2016.

 

Also see:

 

MassiveOpenOnlineForcesEconomist-Feb2014

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Two big forces underpin a university’s costs. The first is the need for physical proximity. Adding students is expensive—they require more buildings and instructors—and so a university’s marginal cost of production is high. That means that even in a competitive market, where price converges towards marginal cost, modern education is dear.

MOOCs work completely differently. Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and co-founder of an online-education site, Marginal Revolution University, reckons the most salient feature of the online course is its rock-bottom marginal cost: teaching additional students is virtually free.

 

The connected TV landscape: Why smart TVs and streaming gadgets are conquering the living room

The connected TV landscape: Why smart TVs and streaming gadgets are conquering the living room — from businessinsider.com.au by Mark Hoelzel

 

In the connected TV world, an app is analogous to a TV channel.

 

Some key points:

  • In total, there will be more than 759 million televisions connected to the Internet worldwide by 2018, more than doubling from 307.4 million at year-end 2013.
  • Globally, shipments of smart TVs will reach a tipping point in 2015, when they will overtake shipments of traditional TVs.
  • Two tendencies dominate the connected TV ecosystem: closed and open approaches.
  • Despite platform fragmentation, HTML5 offers at least a faint hope for increased unification between connected TVs, just as it does on mobile.
  • How will developers and operating system operators monetise smart TV apps? Media downloads, subscriptions and — to a much lesser degree — advertisements will drive the dollars. Smart TV platform operators have begun experimenting with ads.

 

GlobalNumberOfConnectedTVs

 

 

From DSC:
If in a connected TV world, an app is analogous to a TV channel…then I say let’s bring on the educationally-related, interactive, multimedia-based apps!

 

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

 

Coursera comes of age, announces Specializations — from inc.com by Issie Lapowsky
With a new feature that resembles the college major, Coursera gets a new revenue stream–and becomes an increasingly attractive education alternative.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Coursera, the Mountain View, California-based provider of free, massively open online courses, or MOOCs, is launching a new feature called Specializations, the MOOC equivalent of majors. Rather than taking one isolated course for free, students can now select a sequence of courses, which they take in order, for a fee, albeit, a small one. Then, if they pass, students receive a certificate of completion.

“We heard from many students that they wanted help sequencing together courses in order to form more substantive programs of study than can be represented by a single course.  On the flip side, we also heard significant interest from our university partners in offering course sequences,” Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng told me by email. “After discussions with our partners and several student surveys, we decided to proceed with this program, which we believe is the next stage in the development of MOOCs.”

Meanwhile, Specializations solve an equally big pain point for Coursera, namely that revenue’s hard to come by when you’re giving a premium product away for free. This way, students will sign up to get their identities verified, a service for which Coursera charges for each class, meaning Specializations will run students about $200 to $500. It’s substantially cheaper than a degree from a traditional university, and for those who can’t afford it, true to its mission, Coursera is offering students financial aid.

 

Also see:

 

10NewSpecializations-Coursera-Jan2014

 


 

TheWalmartOfEducationIsHere-DSC

 

This vision is now reality.

 


Addendums on 1/22/14:

Georgia Tech MOOC-Based Degree Program Turns Away Nearly 2,000 Applicants — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

A totally MOOC-based master’s degree in computer science announced last spring has opened for business with about 375 students. The new program, being delivered by Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing, claims to be the “first and only” one from an accredited university that operates entirely through a massive open online course format.

The degree program received 2,360 applications during a three-week period in October, about 75 percent more applications than are typically received for the on-campus program during an entire year. Of those, 401 students were offered admission, and 94 percent enrolled for the Spring 2014 semester. According to Georgia Tech, a couple of differences distinguish MOOC enrollment from on-campus enrollment. Whereas 88 percent of the MOOC students are United States citizens or permanent residents, about 90 percent are international in the on-campus program. Also, the average age of the MOOC students is 34.8, about 11 years older than their on-campus counterparts.

 

More Competition for Online Certificate Students — from insidehighered.com by Carl Straumsheim

Excerpt:

An online course provider will this spring introduce bundles of courses created by top-tier universities that can be completed for certificates. That description fits both Academic Partnerships and Coursera, and both programs are called “Specializations.”

The similarities are more than mere coincidence, as the two companies have since last summer discussed a partnership proposed by Academic Partnerships for its platform to use Coursera’s university course offerings. Yet Coursera’s Specializations, announced Tuesday morning, took Academic Partnerships CEO Randy Best by surprise. When the parties spoke last week, Best said Coursera “expressed that they were going to defer for now the idea of Specializations.”

 

 

The Campus of the Future: Hybrid and Lean — from edcetera.rafter.com by Kirsten Winkler

Excerpt:

When people imagine the campus of the future, two main ideas seem to come up. On the one hand, the campus experience will be blended or hybrid, meaning that even with the majority of learning taking place online, there will still be demand for activities in a classic brick-and-mortar setting. On the other hand, the campus of the future will be more like a technology startup, focused on cutting expenses and running a lean operation.

Three recent articles in Education DIVE, The Times Higher Education, Slate and Inc. underline this trend.

 

The above article links to:

Internet mentors could supplant traditional lecturers — from timeshighereducation.co.uk by Jack Grove
Horizon Scanning study points to a ‘new kind of pedagogy’ in higher education by 2020

Excerpt:

Traditional lecturers may soon be replaced by networks of online mentors working for several universities, a new study predicts.

In the report, titled Horizon Scanning: What will higher education look like in 2020?, the Observatory on Borderless Education suggests that academic staff are likely to be employed part-time by several universities – often working remotely via the internet – rather than relying on a single employer.

With one undergraduate module, Forms of Identity, already taught via video conferencing to students at both institutions, the alliance “may be pointing the way to a new kind of pedagogy”, the report says.

“Undergraduate lectures, for example, may be delivered simultaneously to any number of participating institutions, either across a whole sector or indeed across borders,” it states.

 

From DSC:
With adjunct faculty members playing a significant role at many institutions of higher education, I could see a scenario like this occurring.  In fact, even years ago I knew an adjunct faculty member who sat behind her PC all day, servicing students at multiple universities.  I’m sure that this is not a rare occurrence.  Plus, we are already above 30% of the workforce working in a freelance mode, with estimations of this going to 40% or more by 2020.

Learning hubs: (how I define it)
Places of blended/hybrid learning whereby some of the content is “piped in” or made available via the Internet and whereby some of the content is discussed/worked on in a face-to-face manner.

Blended learning -- the best of both worlds

Questions:

  • What if learning hubs spring up in many types of facilities, such as in schools, libraries, buildings on campuses, corporate spaces, parks, cafes, other places?  How might such a trend affect the possible scenario that there will be online mentors working for several universities?
  • Will these mentors make enough to cover insurance costs, retirement costs, etc.?
  • Will this be a potential model for lifelong learning? For learning-on-demand?
  • How might MOOCs — and what they morph into — affect this type of scenario?
  • How might this scenario affect how we teach student teachers? (Will it involve more efforts/endeavors like this one?)
  • Could this type of scenario also happen in the corporate world?

Last comment:

  • I’m not saying that this sort of setup is better than a seminar-like experience that has a dozen or so students setting down with a highly-trained professor in a strictly face-to-face setting.  However, that model is increasingly unobtainable/unaffordable for many people.

 

 

 

 
 

MOOCs ain’t over — from christenseninstitute.org by Michelle Rhee-Weise

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Over the last month, journal headlines have been heralding the death of massive online open courses (MOOCs). You could almost hear the sigh of relief from the academy. With Sebastian Thrun himself acknowledging the “lousy” quality of the MOOC product, told-you-so skeptics have been giddily pointing out that Udacity, in its failure to disrupt higher education, is now moving on to vocational training.

Sadly, what audiences are missing is that Thrun’s shift to workforce training is precisely what has the potential to disrupt and severely impact traditional postsecondary education. We at the Christensen Institute have already written extensively about how MOOCs were not displaying the right markers for disruption (see here, here, here, and here), but we became more hopeful as they started to offer clusters of courses. Coursera announced Foundations of Business with Wharton, while edX and MITX introduced the Xseries in Computer Science as well as Supply Chain & Logistics. These moves appeared to map better to employer needs and what we describe as areas of nonconsumption. In their turn away from career-oriented training, colleges and universities have unwittingly left unattended a niche of nonconsumers—people over-served by traditional forms of higher education, underprepared for the workforce, and seeking lifelong learning pathways.

Udacity’s most recent offering of a Big Data and Data Science track illustrates perfectly how the company is establishing its niche in the space that most traditional institutions have been avoiding.

If a company like Udacity can do a better job of attending to the skills gap and facilitate learning pathways for students that simultaneously build a strong pipeline of qualified candidates for companies, we will soon see that the creation of such programs to meet the demands of the labor market will put enormous pressure on our traditional institutions of higher education. 

 

From DSC:
This is yet another article that illustrates some key points, at least in my mind:

  • Institutions of traditional higher education have a shrinking window of time to address employers’ needs.  The workplace still looks to higher ed in many ways, but alternatives are popping up all the time now.  Either higher ed reinvents itself to become more responsive, or we may find ourselves eventually being forced to find new employers.
    .
  • MOOCs are not done morphing — not even close.  The experimentation will continue. The question is, who will be involved with these experiments?
    .
  • As we are now into lifelong learning, K-12, higher ed, and the corporate training departments will likely all be affected by MOOCs — the lines will likely continue to blur.

 

 
 

Higher education is now ground zero for disruption — from forbes.com by Todd Hixon

Excerpt:

Why? US Higher Ed has a product that does not work, ridiculous costs, and an antiquated business model. For many years we accepted this because we see extraordinary value in education. Now, most middle and upper-middle class parents find they cannot give their children the education they enjoyed. Technology has recently put a spark to this fuel: on-line education works and dramatically improves costs and access. This is a big opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors. Many new companies and programs will emerge in 2014.

 

Also see:

What the flattening industry means for higher education — from evoLLLution.com by Mark Greenfield

Excerpt:

Higher education is getting flattened. Flattening happens “when the impact of the Internet and globalization render an industry unrecognizable, and in many cases, obsolete.”[1] The term is taken from “The World Is Flat,” the seminal book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman.

So, do I think higher education will become obsolete? No. But do I think higher education will become unrecognizable? Absolutely.

 

Why 6 colleges are cutting tuition — from educationdive.com by Daniel Shumski

Excerpt:

Amid news that the “sticker price” for college tuition is often a work of fiction — there are at least 200 colleges where no one pays full price for their education — some schools have been striking out in a different direction. They’re lowering their prices across the board in a practice sometimes called a “tuition reset.”

The idea is simple: Rather than tempting students with big discounts, administrators are hoping that applying a lower tuition more consistently will help them stand out. In most cases, the schools maintain that it’s not about taking in less money in the aggregate and that their programs will not suffer.

So what kinds of numbers are we talking about? Here are six schools that cut their tuition drastically, along with a look at the hard numbers and what the school had to say about the price drop.

 

The Amazon of higher education — from slate.com by Gabriel Kahn
How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.

Excerpt:

Five years ago, Southern New Hampshire University was a 2,000-student private school struggling against declining enrollment, poor name recognition, and teetering finances.

Today, it’s the Amazon.com of higher education. The school’s burgeoning online division has 180 different programs with an enrollment of 34,000. Students are referred to as “customers.” It undercuts competitors on tuition. And it deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.

“We are super-focused on customer service, which is a phrase that most universities can’t even use,” says Paul LeBlanc, SNHU’s president.

Addendum on 1/9/14:

MOOCs ain’t over — from christenseninstitute.org by Michelle Rhee-Weise

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Over the last month, journal headlines have been heralding the death of massive online open courses (MOOCs). You could almost hear the sigh of relief from the academy. With Sebastian Thrun himself acknowledging the “lousy” quality of the MOOC product, told-you-so skeptics have been giddily pointing out that Udacity, in its failure to disrupt higher education, is now moving on to vocational training.

Sadly, what audiences are missing is that Thrun’s shift to workforce training is precisely what has the potential to disrupt and severely impact traditional postsecondary education. We at the Christensen Institute have already written extensively about how MOOCs were not displaying the right markers for disruption (see here, here, here, and here), but we became more hopeful as they started to offer clusters of courses. Coursera announced Foundations of Business with Wharton, while edX and MITX introduced the Xseries in Computer Science as well as Supply Chain & Logistics. These moves appeared to map better to employer needs and what we describe as areas of nonconsumption. In their turn away from career-oriented training, colleges and universities have unwittingly left unattended a niche of nonconsumers—people over-served by traditional forms of higher education, underprepared for the workforce, and seeking lifelong learning pathways.

 

 

IDC predicts 2014 will be a year of escalation, consolidation, and innovation as the transition to IT’s “3rd platform” accelerates — from idc.com

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

  • The 3rd Platform will deliver the next generation of competitive advantage apps and services that will significantly disrupt market leaders in virtually every industry.
  • Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% year over year to $2.1 trillion in 2014.
  • Emerging markets will return to double-digit growth of 10%, driving nearly $740 billion or 35% of worldwide IT revenues
  • Within the 3rd Platform, value will start to migrate “up the stack”, from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to platform as a service (PaaS) and from generic PaaS to data-optimized PaaS.
  • Cloud spending, including cloud services and the technology to enable these services, will surge by 25% in 2014, reaching over $100 billion.

 

Also see:

What is the 3rd platform and how will it affect business? — by Mark Neistat US Signal Company

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Simply stated, the 3rd Platform is the next phase of the IT revolution. The first platform was the mainframe computer. The second was Personal Computers (PC) which dominated the IT landscape from 1985 to 2005. The 3rd Platform is being built on mobile computing, social networking, cloud services, and Big Data analytics technologies.

 

You’ll never guess who’s disrupting online learning — from forbes.com by Chris Proulx, President & CEO of eCornell

Excerpt:

The reality behind the hype is that online education has been disruptive for over a decade, well before MOOCs. Certainly since the economic downturn in 2009, we have seen an accelerated focus on agile work practices and more rapid adjustments in company strategy. This change has created opportunities for employees to drive their career growth by becoming masters at acquiring and applying new skills in short bursts. Much of this has come through on the job skill development, but individuals and organizations alike are also adapting their more formal training and education approaches so it aligns with the accelerating pace of business.

First, in the 21st economy, education needs to be as much about context as it needs to be about content. Second, it needs to put the learner in control of the pace, timing, and application of the learning. Third, it needs to blend concepts with practice by aligning expertise from traditional faculty with non-traditional expert-practitioners in order to drive relevance.

But just like with iTunes, the next step for the digitization of higher ed will need to come with new sustainable business models, not just technology, to drive widespread adoption and change.

 

Learning from the Living (Class) Room [Grush & Christian]

CampusTechnology-12-5-13-DSCLivingClassRoom

 

Learning in ‘the Living [Class] Room’
From campustechnology.com by Mary Grush and Daniel Christian
Convergent technologies have the ability to support streams of low-cost, personalized content, both at home and in college.

 

Items re: Helpouts by Google, which was just introduced on Monday, November 4th, 2013:


 

HelpoutsByGoogle-IntroducedNov-4-2013

 

 

 


From DSC:
This type of thing goes hand and hand with what I’m saying in the Learning from the Living Room vision/concept:  “More choice. More control.”   This type of thing may impact K-12, higher ed, and corporate training/L&D departments.

It this how we are going to make a living in the future?  If so, what changes do we need to make:

  • To the curricula out there?
  • To the “cores” out there?
  • In helping people build their digital/online-based footprints?
  • In helping people market themselves?

 

 

 

“Learning in the Living [Class] Room” — as explained by Daniel Christian [Campus Technology]

Learning from the Living [Class] Room  — from Campus Technology by Daniel Christian and Mary Grush; with a huge thanks also going out to Mr. Steven Niedzielski (@Marketing4pt0) and to Mr. Sam Beckett (@SamJohnBeck) for their assistance and some of the graphics used in making these videos.

From DSC:
These 4 short videos explain what I’m trying to relay with a vision I’m entitling, Learning from the Living [Class] Room.  I’ve been pulse checking a variety of areas for years now, and the pieces of this vision continue to come into fruition.  This is what I see Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) morphing into (though there may be other directions/offshoots that they go in as well).

After watching these videos, I think you will see why I think we must move to a teambased approach.

(It looks like the production folks for Campus Technology had to scale things way back in terms of video quality to insure an overall better performance for the digitally-based magazine.) 


To watch these videos in a higher resolution, please use these links:


  1. What do you mean by “the living [class] room”?
  2. Why consider this now?
  3. What are some examples of apps and tech for “the living [class] room”?
  4. What skill sets will be needed to make “the living [class] room” a reality?

 

 


Alternatively, these videos can be found at:


 

DanielSChristianLearningFromTheLivingClassRoom-CampusTechnologyNovember2013

.

 

 

Innovation imperative: Change everything  — from nytimes.com by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn; with a special thanks to Mr. Joel Adams at Calvin College for the resource here

Online education as an agent of transformation

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Like steam, online education is a disruptive innovation — one that introduces more convenient and affordable products or services that over time transform sectors. Yet many bricks-and-mortar colleges are making the same mistake as the once-dominant tall ships: they offer online courses but are not changing the existing model. They are not saving students time and money, the essential steps to disruption. And though their approach makes sense in the short term, it leaves them vulnerable as students gravitate toward less expensive colleges.

Still, the theory predicts that, be it steam or online education, existing consumers will ultimately adopt the disruption, and a host of struggling colleges and universities — the bottom 25 percent of every tier, we predict — will disappear or merge in the next 10 to 15 years.  Already traditional universities are showing the strains of a broken business model, reflecting demand and pricing pressures previously unheard-of in higher education.

 

 

To serve them, it will enlist operators to create mini-campuses around the globe where clusters of its students will live and socialize together in residence halls, as well as take online courses and work together on projects.

 

 

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian