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.

 

25 trends disrupting education right now — from teachthought.com by Terry Heick

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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.

Your future TV is not about Tele-Vision [Eaton]

Your future TV is not about Tele-Vision — from FastCompany.com by Kit Eaton

Excerpt (emphasis below from DSC; also see the above categories to see how I see this as a highly-relevant component to our future learning ecosystems):

Then imagine what a hybrid of Apple’s tech and efforts like GetGlue, Shazam, and other interactive systems will be like when they’re more integrated into your 2017 smart TV. The big screen in your living room won’t be a one-way window into another world you can’t touch anymore. It’ll be a discovery engine, a way to learn facts, interact with the world, talk to people, find new and surprising content to absorb. Advertisers will love it, and companies like Nielsen–which largely has to guess all those stats about who watches which show at primetime nowadays–will be able to get accurate data…which may mean more appealing shows.

 

 

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

 

 

Also see:

[video_lightbox_vimeo5 video_id=46294572 width=800 height=600 anchor=”http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ExploringDisruptions-Mark-Elgart-August2012.jpg”]

(Click on above image to see the video)

Also see:
http://www.advanc-ed.org/

Key quote/lesson from “How Barnes & Noble destroyed itself” — from fool.com by John Maxfield

An unnecessary tragedy
What makes B&N’s story tragic from a shareholder’s and book-lover’s perspective is that it wasn’t inevitable. The company would be in an entirely different position if its leadership hadn’t pooh-poohed online retail in the late 1990s, when the now-dominant Amazon was in its infancy. Consider this from its 1998 annual report: “Although it is clear the World Wide Web, with its profound possibilities, will become a major component of the future of bookselling and publishing, we believe retail bookstores will remain the foundation of our industry . . . shopping and browsing in a bookstore is an irreplaceable experience, and it is woven securely into the fabric of our American culture [emphasis added].”

From DSC:
I love going to B&N; sipping some coffee and reading a book. So don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the physical experience of going to a bookstore. But the lesson for higher ed — as well as for the corporate world — is that technology cannot be pooh-poohed and shoved aside.  Those who do so will be very sorry that they chose that route. There can be danger in pursuing the status quo.

How about your organization…is there solid representation of technology on your board/executive suite/leadership team?

My last thought here relates to my posting  What happens in our hearts has very practical, relevant implications in our daily lives

In 2009, the company paid its chairman of the board, Len Riggio, nearly $600 million for B&N College, an amalgamation of campus-based bookstores that controlled the rights to the parent company’s trade name and was then owned by Riggio and his wife.

At the time, it looked like a classic covetous overreach by an executive to extract capital without selling shares. When all that’s left of B&N is a Harvard case study, however, my guess is that this blatant display of avarice and disregard for minority shareholders will be characterized more ominously as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

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Also relevant here:

When the technologies behind Watson and Siri get perfected and integrated into the “Learning from the Living [Class] Room” environment [Christian]


From DSC:

When the technologies behind IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri get perfected and integrated into products and services that will make up the near future “Learning from the Living [Class] Room” environment— there will be:


 

  • A high degree of personalization and customization — available 24x7x365 on multiple kinds of devices
    .
  • The option to turn on tracking and analytics — reporting from which can be moved into the learner’s cloud-based profile upon completion of the unit/activity/badge
    .
  • Students of all ages will have access to their own virtual tutors so to speak
    .
  • When a virtual tutor is unable to resolve or address the student’s issue to the student’s satisfaction, the student will be able to instantly access a human tutor (with the option of keeping the existing work/issue/problems visible to the human tutor)

 

IBM's Watson -- incredible AI!

 

 

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

 

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Addendums:

 

Investing in your own disruption — from edcetera.rafter.com by Kirsten Winkler

Excerpt:

What do you do when you realize that the business you have been building over the past decades, if not centuries, is toast? Well, you can entrench yourself and fight the last battle, trying to squeeze as much as possible out of what is left, or simply call it a wrap and move on.

Publisher Macmillan seems to have chosen the latter. PandoDaily published an interesting post about Macmillan New Ventures, a $100 million (or more) fund led by former Questia Media CEO Troy Williams. The task: invest in education technology startups that will eventually disrupt the publishing industry.

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http://www.ringadoc.com

 

From DSC:
With webcams and web-based collaboration tools becoming more sophisticated all the time, I wonder how this relatively new concept/service will do…? Perhaps well, if the price and quality are right.  If it does succeed, I expect Ringalawyer.com won’t be far behind it.

 

 

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“Learning from the living room” — Part I [Christian]

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

 

 

Legal size PDF here

 

 

Addendum on 7/3/12 from an article I wrote for EvoLLLution.com (for LifeLong Learning):
Establishing better collaboration between the corporate world and higher education [Christian]

In the near future, perhaps we could have second screen-based activities whereby corporate leaders are giving TED-like presentations or expressing the current issues in their worlds via a program on Smart TVs, and the students are communicating and collaborating about these presentations via tablets or smart phones.  Perhaps there will be electronic means whereby students could submit their ideas and feedback to the presenting companies (and whereby selected ideas could be rewarded in terms of free products or services that the company produces).

 

 

Videos from Qualcomm Uplinq 2012 show the future of Smart TV
— from hexus.net by Mark Tyson

Excerpt:
Here are the feature highlights of these “redefined” Smart TVs:

  • Console quality gaming
  • Concurrency of apps
  • Miracast wireless technology allowing smartphone and tablet screens to partake in multi-screen interactivity
  • Personalisation and facial recognition
  • Gestures
  • HD picture quality
  • HD video calling

 

From DSC:
…and add to that list the power of customized learning and analytics!

Penn launches its first free online classes via Coursera — from the University of Pennsylvania

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

PHILADELPHIA — This week, the University of Pennsylvania launched three free courses via Coursera, an online educational platform designed to make Web-based classes available more widely.

With the capacity to reach millions of people simultaneously, Coursera has a design inspired by educational research on effective learning practices and creates an interactive learning experience for the course offerings.

So far, more than 50,000 people from around the world have enrolled in these three online courses, all stemming from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine:

  1. Fundamentals of Pharmacology with Emma Meagher, an attending physician in preventive cardiology at Penn Medicine and the director of Penn’s four-year pharmacology curriculum.
  2. Vaccines with Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics in the Perelman School and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who has made it his life’s work to educate both the medical profession and the public on the value of vaccinations.
  3. Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act with Ezekiel Emanuel, the vice provost for global initiatives at Penn and the chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy.  He is also a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor in the Perelman School and the Wharton School.

Online education startups: A field guide — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner

The Higher Education Bubble

Book Description
Publication Date: June 26, 2012

America is facing a higher education bubble. Like the housing bubble, it is the product of cheap credit coupled with popular expectations of ever-increasing returns on investment, and as with housing prices, the cheap credit has caused college tuitions to vastly outpace inflation and family incomes. Now this bubble is bursting.

In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains the causes and effects of this bubble and the steps colleges and universities must take to ensure their survival. Many graduates are unable to secure employment sufficient to pay off their loans, which are usually not dischargeable in bankruptcy. As students become less willing to incur debt for education, colleges and universities will have to adapt to a new world of cost pressures and declining public support.

About the Author
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He writes for such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Examiner. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

Also see:

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From DSC:
Note many of the relevant categories and tags I put this under — items I’ve been covering for years:

  • Walmart of Education
  • Cost of obtaining a degree
  • Reinventing oneself
  • Dangers of the status quo
  • Game-changing environment
  • Future of higher education
  • Leadership
  • Strategy
  • Staying relevant
  • Disruption
  • Surviving

 

Doctors on demand: 5 startups wiping out the waiting room — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner

 

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