Do campus universities provide more value for the money spent by the students? I think of the social growth of the young mind and the face to face interaction between the teachers and the students as two big values. Online universities do provide an alternative to students scraping money to get an education or others trying to improve their earning power while working. But the experience can never be the same as attending a campus university. Any comment? How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University
Published: July 25, 2011 Authors: Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring Forum open for comment — 2 Comments — Post a comment Executive Summary: In The Innovative University, authors Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. Key concepts include: A disruptive innovation brings to market a product or service that isn't as good as the best traditional offerings, but is less expensive and easier to use. Online learning is a disruptive technology that is making colleges and universities reconsider their higher education models. Easy Print View E-mail To A Friend Share Article Add to Del.ici.ous Digg this Article Add to Facebook Add to Reddit Seed Newsvine Technorati Favorite Stumble It! Twitter LinkedIn E-mail the Editor Download PDF About Faculty in this Article: Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. More Working Knowledge from Clayton M. Christensen Clayton M. Christensen - Faculty Research Page Editor's note: It has been more than a decade since the publication of The Innovator's Dilemma, in which Clayton M. Christensen introduced the idea of disruptive technologies—those unexpected products and services that shake up the market not because they are better than the traditional competition, but because they are are cheaper and easier to use. In The Innovative University, Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take the idea of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. In this excerpt, they discuss the idea of a university's DNA. In the absence of a disruptive new technology, the combination of prestige and loyal support from donors and legislators has allowed traditional universities to weather occasional storms. Fundamental change has been unnecessary. That is no longer true, though, for any but a relative handful of institutions. Costs have risen to unprecedented heights, and new competitors are emerging. A disruptive technology, online learning, is at work in higher education, allowing both for-profit and traditional not-for-profit institutions to rethink the entire traditional higher education model. Private universities without national recognition and large endowments are at great financial risk. So are public universities, even prestigious ones such as the University of California at Berkeley. Price-sensitive students and fiscally beleaguered legislatures have begun to resist costs that consistently rise faster than those of other goods and services. With the advent of high-quality online learning, there are new, less expensive institutional alternatives to traditional universities, their standing enhanced by changes in accreditation standards that play to their strengths in demonstrating student learning outcomes. These institutions are poised to respond cost-effectively to the national need for increased college participation and completion. A disruptive technology, online learning, is at work in higher education, allowing both for-profit and traditional not-for-profit institutions to rethink the entire traditional higher education model. For the vast majority of universities change is inevitable. The main questions are when it will occur and what forces will bring it about. It would be unfortunate if internal delay caused change to come through external regulation or pressure from newer, nimbler competitors. Until now, American higher education has largely regulated itself, to great effect. U.S. universities are among the most lightly regulated by government. They are free to choose what discoveries to pursue and what subjects to teach, without concern for economic or political agendas. Responsibly exercised, this freedom is a great intellectual and competitive advantage. Traditional universities benefit society not just by producing intelligent graduates and valuable discoveries but also by fostering unmarketable yet invaluable intangibles such as social tolerance, personal responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. Each is a unique community of scholars in which lives as well as minds are molded. Pure profit-based competition would produce fewer of these social goods, just as increased government regulation would dampen the great universities' genius for discovery. Ideally, the faculty members, administrators, and alumni who best appreciate the totality of the university's contributions to society will, in the spirit of self-regulation, play a leading role in revitalizing their beloved institutions. They have the capacity to determine their own fate and in so doing take the indispensable university to new heights. In performing that critical task, they must understand not only current realities, especially the threat of competitive disruption, but also how universities have evolved over the past several hundred years. Even more than most organizations, traditional universities are products of their history. That history is shared, because most universities have emulated a handful of elite American schools that began to assume their modern form a century and a half ago. Prominent among them were Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and MIT. Together, they have evolved to share common institutional traits, a sort of university DNA. Much as the identity of a living organism is reflected in its every cell, the identity of a university can be found in the structure of departments and in the relationships among faculty and administrators. It is written into course catalogs, into standards for admitting students and promoting professors, and into strategies for raising funds and recruiting athletes. It can be seen in the campus buildings and grounds. These institutional characteristics remain the same even as individual people come and go. Pioneering institutions such as Harvard and Yale first began granting Ph.D.s in the mid-nineteenth century. As graduates of their doctoral programs joined the faculties of other universities, they took their experiences and expectations with them. With the support of ambitious university presidents, they strove to make their new academic environments like those from which they had come. This internal drive was reinforced by external systems for accrediting, classifying, and ranking universities. It also became embedded in a common academic culture. As a result, even the smallest and most obscure universities bear many of the essential traits of the greatest ones. Much as the identity of a living organism is reflected in its every cell, the identity of a university can be found in the structure of departments and in the relationships among faculty and administrators. University DNA is not only similar across institutions, it is also highly stable, having evolved over hundreds of years. Replication of the DNA occurs continuously, as each retiring employee or graduating student is replaced by someone screened against the same criteria applied to his or her predecessor. The way things are done is determined not by individual preference but by institutional procedure written into the genetic code. There is evolution in the university, though its mechanism typically is not natural selection of random mutations. As a general rule, the university alters itself only in thoughtful response to significant needs and opportunities. Entrepreneurism occurs within fixed bounds; there is rarely revolution of the type so often heralded in business or politics. This steadiness is a major source of universities' value to a fickle, fad-prone society. Yet the university's steadiness is also why one cannot make it more responsive to modern economic and social realities merely by regulating its behavior. The genetic tendencies are too strong. The institutional genes expressed in course catalogs and in standards for admitting students and promoting faculty are selfish, replicating themselves faithfully even at the expense of the institution's welfare. A university cannot be made more efficient by simply cutting its operating budget, any more than a carnivore can be converted to an herbivore by constraining its intake of meat. Nor can universities be made by legislative fiat to perform functions for which they are not expressly designed. For example, requiring universities to admit underprepared students is unlikely to produce a proportional number of new college graduates. It is not in the typical university's genetic makeup to remediate such students, and neither regulation nor economic pressure will be enough, alone, to change that. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from The Innovative University, by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring. Copyright © 2011 by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring. Reader Comments: I am not surprised. We are still running a model that is 2000 years old or so. Education really needs a flip upside-down and technology is already doing it by providing so much information to the public directly. What education needs is a way to be able to educate more people at their own pace, in their own space, catering to their needs, not industry's. That means education is now a consumption driven by real curiosity which requires more room for mature students in the model also. Innovation, creativity, ingenuity and risk are not things one can project manage. They do not fit into a time frame. They occur as more information comes in at the right time. The more meaningful and appropriate the information, available when it is sought is the real meaning of being a student for life. Current university models are not conducive to innovation and high levels of information, technology or the modern learning requirements, mod ern work and world issues. The only way is to provide everyone with more flexibility in every aspect of education. This frees up more time and thinking power on creativity and innovation because it's clear and focused ideas that still drives progress, not just a few years of basic knowledge. Basic knowledge anyone is capable of obtaining, anywhere now. Universities need to see their roles as long term educators if they want to stick around is my opinion. Anonymous "Innovation, creativity, ingenuity and risk are not things one can project manage. They do not fit into a time frame. They occur as more information comes in at the right time." Perhaps if project time was allocated in anticipation of these events occuring this wouldn't be a problem. Isn't it the task of management to project the risks for any given project? Seems risk avoidance as oppose to taking any risk is what education is doing. This is why education is behind the learning curve of industry. They do not practise what they preach (mostly). But this is expected since industry has concetrated resources for tool creation that leads to 'the next thing'. Anonymous _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
