From DSC:
The other day, I mentioned how important it will be for institutions of higher education to increase the priority of experimentation. Clicking on the graphic below will give you an example of the kind of vision/experiment that I’m talking about.

(Though, more practically speaking, to operationalize this type of vision would actually require a series of much smaller experiments; I just wanted to present the overall vision of how these pieces might fit together).

 

DanielChristian--Jan2013-Experiment-with-Apples-Ecosystem

NOTE:
This 11″x17″ image is a 10MB PDF file, so it may take some time to appear.
Feel free to right-click on the graphic in order to download/save/print the file as well.

 

Also relevant is this upcoming event from educause:

 

1/8/13 addendum resulting from a Tweet from a great colleague, Mr. Travis LaFleur (@travislafleur), UX Designer at BiggsGilmore

 

 

From the January/February 2013 issue of The American Interest:

 

.

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity*. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.

Because recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information. The internet destroyed the livelihoods of traditional stock brokers and bonds salesmen by throwing open to everyone access to the proprietary information they used to sell. The same technology enabled bankers and financiers to develop new products and methods, but, as it turned out, the experience necessary to manage it all did not keep up. Prior to the Wall Street meltdown, it seemed absurd to think that storied financial institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers could disappear seemingly overnight. Until it happened, almost no one believed such a thing was possible. Well, get ready to see the same thing happen to a university near you, and not for entirely dissimilar reasons.

The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a new era of creative destruction produces a merciless shakeout of those institutions that adapt and prosper from those that stall and die.

But what happens when a limited supply of a sought-after commodity suddenly becomes unlimited? Prices fall. Yet here, on the cusp of a new era of online education, that is a financial reality that few American universities are prepared to face.

Anyone who can access the internet—at a public library, for instance—no matter how poor or disadvantaged or isolated or uneducated he or she may be, can access the teachings of some of the greatest scholars of our time through open course portals. Technology is a great equalizer.

Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise. Few who will be affected by the changes ahead are aware of what’s coming. Severe financial contraction in the higher-ed industry is on the way, and for many this will spell hard times both financially and personally. But if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate.

 

 


* The old way:

Colleges rise as they reject — from online.wsj.com
Schools invite more applications, then use denials to boost coveted rankings


 

 

Daniel S. Christian - Think Virtual -- April 2012

 

Also relevant/see:

Executing on Mary Meeker’s Vision for America: USA Inc. — from readwrite.com by Michael Tchong

Excerpt:

In true Meeker style, USA Inc. is a meticulously crafted, chart-heavy presentation. This one, though, paints a bleak picture. Most startling: America’s entitlement costs accounted for 56% of spending in fiscal 2011, 40 years ago it was just 25%. Here is more food for thought:

  • Expenses have exceeded revenue in all but five of the past 47 years.
  • 1 in 50 Americans needed Medicaid when it was created in 1965. Today, 1 in 6 do.
  • Unfunded and underfunded entitlement liabilities now total $66 trillion.

 

 Also see:

 

Tagged with:  

Reflecting on the Top IT Issues of 2012 — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

  1. Updating IT professionals’ skills and roles to accommodate new technologies and changing IT delivery models
  2. Supporting IT consumerization and bring-your-own device programs
  3. Developing a cloud strategy
  4. Improving the institution’s operational efficiency through IT
  5. Integrating IT into institutional decision-making
  6. Using analytics to support the important institutional outcomes
  7. Funding IT initiatives
  8. Transforming the institution’s business with IT
  9. Supporting research with high-performance computing, large data, and analytics
  10. Establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution

 

Also see:

Involving students in IT — — from campustechnology.com by Keith Norbury
IT shops are turning to students to staff help desks, troubleshoot, and more. For schools, it’s a way to cut costs; for students, it’s a learning experience and a pathway to employment.

.

 

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.

.

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

 

.

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

.

 

 

.

 

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

.

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.

.

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:

 

.

 

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.

.

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.

.

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

.

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?

.

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.

.

 

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.

 

.

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

 

.

Business model innovation: A blueprint for higher education — from Educause by Christine Flanagan

Excerpt:

Business model innovation is one of the most challenging components of 21st-century leadership. Making incremental improvements to a business model—creating new efficiencies, expanding into adjacent markets—is hard enough. Developing and experimenting with new business models that truly transform how an institution delivers value (while continuing to drive the performance of the current business model) is exceptionally difficult. Yet nowhere is the imperative for business model innovation more prevalent or more relevant than in higher education, which is under intense scrutiny and facing rising costs and potential disruption from all angles.

To compete in a world where the shelf life of business models is shortening, higher education leaders need the tools, skills, and experience to envision, test, and implement new business models. They must believe in the power of experimenting, in the real world, with a network of collaborators who have the audacity to change everything. As the legendary innovation mastermind Clayton Christensen says: “You don’t change a company by giving them ideas. You change them by training them to think a different way.”1

The future of English higher education: two scenarios on the changing landscape -- May 2012 by Huisman, de Boer, and Pimentel Botas

.

From DSC:
Whether one agrees or not with the scenarios…what’s important here is to promote discussions of the future of higher education across the world. Developing scenarios is an excellent way to jump start such conversations, contribute to strategic plans/visions, and develop responses to the changing higher education landscape.

Inter-Organizational Task Force on Online Learning: Recommendations| September 20, 2012

From DSC:
What caught my eye:

  • The new “traditional” student: the adult learner
Tagged with:  

http://www.futurict.eu/

.

 

Project summary for FuturICT

.

Also see:

  • Scientists aim to predict the future with $1 billion Earth simulator — from dvice.com
    Excerpt:
    Imagine what would happen if you had a computer program that could take in data from sensors everywhere on Earth and then plug that data into a detailed simulation for the entire Earth all at once. If you’re imagining being able to predict the future, you’re imagining correctly, and E.U. researchers want to make it real.The Living Earth Simulator is a billion-dollar proposal to spend ten years developing a computer environment that can simulate everything. And not just simulate, but also explore predictive models of how everything going on in the world interrelates with everything else, deriving connections and correlations that we never knew existed.

    In order to get that billion dollars, the Living Earth Simulator has to beat out four other future and emerging technologies projects that are all trying to win funding from the European Commission.

 

Tagged with:  

My hats off to Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring!  My respect level just went up yet another notch for these two people.

Seeing as Clayton is a Professor at ***Harvard‘s*** Business School and Henry is an ***Administrator*** at Brigham Young University, their stance and recent letter to college and university trustees nationwide is a wonderful example of true leadership.   They risked many things by taking a stand and urging institutions of higher education to change. Their purpose is noble. Their message should be heeded.

From the website of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni: (emphasis by DSC)

Clayton Christensen: higher ed trustees “crucial as never before”
Harvard Business School professor (and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring of Brigham Young University recently sent a letter to college and university trustees nationwide, recognizing a critical turning point for the future of higher education. “If you’ve been serving for more than a few years, you’ve seen a big change in the nature of trustees meetings,” the authors wrote. “Before the downturn of 2008, the agenda tended to focus on growth and on ways to fund it…. At some point, the bubble was bound to burst—or at least start to sag. Now that it has, your role becomes crucial as never before.” The letter urges trustees to demand innovative solutions to expand student access and improve academic quality at their institutions: “The innovators can do more than merely avoid disruption. They can help usher in a new age of higher education, one of unprecedented access and quality, a combined industrial revolution and renaissance.”

 

.

Addendum on 7/16/12:

Magic Quadrant 2012 for E-Discovery Software — from Gartner.com

.

Excerpt:

The e-discovery market landscape has shifted dramatically as end users have begun to demand more complete e-discovery functionality. Many vendors are responding with broader end-to-end functionality. New products, acquisitions and shifts in buying patterns have led to a radically altered picture.

.

Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure — from Gartner.com

Connectivity at the edge of an enterprise network is more than just a wired or wireless LAN infrastructure. Enterprises must chose infrastructure vendors that support network services, including security and management, and can integrate wired and wireless networking products.

 

Tagged with:  

I’ll be in the HoloClass today — from The EvoLLLution (LLL=LifeLongLearning) by Frank Palatnick,  UN Advisor of Global Education, International Agency for Economic Development

From DSC:
A creative and very interesting vision from Frank — the first in the series that The Evolution is running re: education in the mid-21st century.  I can’t help but wonder how this vision impacts jobs/career paths out there. Nice work Frank.

We can’t wait another year for a new ESEA — from ednetinsight.com by Mary Broderick
Mary Broderick, 2011-2012 President, National School Boards Association (NSBA), and the former chair of Connecticut’s East Lyme Board of Education — Friday, April 13, 2012

Excerpt:

For nearly five years, school leaders around the country have urged Congress to make dramatic changes to the No Child Left Behind law. We’re now reaching a critical point where too many schools are being unfairly penalized, community support is undermined, and we’re forced to sacrifice vital subjects that engage students to focus on state tests.

NCLB—the ten-year-old version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—marked nearly half of all public schools as “failing” last year, and 100% will be “failing” by 2014. This absurd statistic demonstrates that the law isn’t working the way it was intended. However, because Congress hasn’t seized the initiative to make major changes, school districts are operating in limbo between a flawed law and an unsure future in the direction of federal policy. For our public schools to move forward and for our children to be competitive, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is pushing Congress to pass a new law this year. NSBA represents the nation’s 13,800 school boards, but there’re thousands of administrators, teachers, and other school staff members who also see the law’s problems firsthand.

Rethinking higher education business models — from americanprogress.org by Robert Sheets, Stephen Crawford, Louis Soares

Excerpt:

The theory ofdisruptive innovation—the notion that certain innovation can improve a product or service in such a way that it creates new markets that displace existing ones—was developed and advanced by Christensen in the 1990s. According to Christensen, who has studied the evolution of many industries, disruptive innovation occurs when sophisticated technologies are used to create more simplified and more accessible solutions to customers’ problems—solutions that are often less high performing than previous technologies but whose price and convenience attract whole new categories of consumers. The first generations of transistor radios, desktop computers, and MP3 players are examples. These new solutions—innovations to existing technologies deployed through new business models—gradually improved to the point where they displaced the previously dominant solutions. Christensen’s key point, however, is that new technologies like these cannot achieve their transformative potential without compatible changes in their industry’s business models and value networks, which in turn may require shifts in the standards and regulatory environment.

From DSC:
Given the current rumblings of massive changes that are about to take place (if they haven’t already) within the higher education landscape, each person within higher education that has key strategic and leadership responsibilities should be required to read the two books mentioned below. I assert this because these world-class researchers and authors have discovered and documented phenomenon that is affecting all of higher education at this point in time. Understanding the concepts in these books will help your college or university not only survive — but thrive — in the future.

  • The Innovator’s Dilemma — by Clayton M. Christensen
    Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Christensen is also co-founder of Innosight, a management consultancy; Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm; and Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank. He is the author or coauthor of five books including the New York Times bestsellers The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution and most recently, Disrupting Class.
    .
  • Disrupting class, expanded edition: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns — by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn.

.

Also:

From DSC:
That article reminds me of a posting on my archived site from 4/11/09:

Let’s reallocate funds towards course development, and then let’s leverage those learning materials throughout the world!

 

Reallocate funds to course development, and bring costs WAAAAYYYY down and ACCESS WAAAYYY  UP!

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.

© 2024 | Daniel Christian