Not so fast, Ernie :
Who is offering these online courses ? Well, professors from well known
and accredited universities. That is, universities --even if independent
minded
innovative faculty are taking the lead-- remain drivers in the process,
or are becoming drivers.
I think I get what it is you would like to see happen, but --I have this
problem
in other areas and doubtless we all do-- it isn't kosher to predict what
one
wishes for as if you have come up with an objective forecast.
Then there is the false analogy. What has survived for really long periods
of time ?
True, fortune 500 companies come and go, but that is how the competitive
marketplace
works. OTOH, the stock exchange itself is still around and is 200+ years
old,
newspapers are still with us even as some fall by the wayside while the
survivors
are adapting as best they can, some successfully ( WSJ, Financial Times,
NY Times, W Post ).
But education serves a government function, not a market function, More
accurately,
it serve both functions. Gvt wants an educated workforce and citizenry.
Sometimes this dovetails nicely with the market, sometimes not.
So, universities are sort of a hybrid and, as such, you can't make
a 1 : 1 comparison with Wall Street. As well, some universities have,
by design, non-profit objectives, like --at least in theory--
all religious colleges and universities.
So, please note these issues with the article.
However, set this all aside. There are other matters that I think call for
focus
of attention. Knowing this stuff, or learning it on the fly, let's suppose
we
at RC.org are the de facto members of a Board of Regents.
We head up Radical Centrist University, a strictly online
institution of higher learning. In our plans is creation of
in-person ed programs in the future, but we aren't ready
for that and need to get off the ground with
our online program first.
OK, if this is the problem, what is the solution ?
Where do we begin ? What are our priorities ? What kind of
marketing plan would work for us ? What "courses" will we offer ?
Will we make available short modules so that ":students" can learn
discreet skills that may not warrant an entire course ? And so forth.
In other words, how do we make use of all these fine things
we have been learning ?
Billy
=========================================================
3/14/2012 2:31:34 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]
writes:
Dang, someone beat me to it. :-)
E
The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak
* _
Kevin Carey
_
(http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/101620/higher-education-accreditation-MIT-university#)
* March 13, 2012 | 12:00 am
* _23 comments_
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@claychristensen at March 14, 2012 at 07:29AM
_http://t.co/KZmjDPAe_ (http://t.co/KZmjDPAe)
____________________________________
In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index
of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today. While
General Electric remains an industrial giant, the U.S. Leather Company,
American Cotton Oil, and others have long since disappeared into bankruptcy or
consolidation. Today, the Dow Jones includes giant corporations that hadn’
t even been created when Ronald Reagan first sat in the Oval Office. That
transition is generally understood as the natural consequence of innovation
and competition in a changing world.
Four years after Dow invented his average, a group of 14 leading research
institutions created the Association of American Universities. All of them
exist today. While a few have faded from prominence, most of the original
members—including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and Yale—are now,
as they were then, the most sought-after and well-regarded American
universities.
The historic stability of higher education is remarkable. As former
University of California President Clark Kerr once observed, the 85 human
institutions that have survived in recognizable form for the last 500 years
include the Catholic Church, a few Swiss cantons, the Parliaments of Iceland
and
the Isle of Man, and about 70 universities. The occasional small liberal
arts school goes under, and many public universities are suffering budget
cuts, but as a rule, colleges are forever.
I think that rule is going to change, and soon. Many factors explain the
endurance of higher education institutions—the ascent of the knowledge
economy, their crucial role in upper-middle class acculturation, our peculiar
national enthusiasm for college sports—but the single greatest asset held by
traditional colleges and universities is their exclusive franchise for the
production and sale of higher education credentials.
In the last few months, however, that monopoly has begun to crumble. New
organizations are being created to offer new kinds of degrees, in a manner
and at a price that could completely disrupt the enduring college business
model. The question is: Which colleges and universities will be the G.E. of
the twenty-first century, and which will be as forgotten as U.S. Leather?
THE FIRST SIGN came in mid-December, when the trade publication
InsideHigherEd _wrote about_
(http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/13/stanfords-open-courses-raise-questions-about-true-value-elite-education)
a group of
adjunct professors at Stanford University who were offering their courses in
Artificial Intelligence and other computer science topics to anyone in the
world, online, at no charge. Tens of thousands of students had signed up.
The availability of free Internet courses itself wasn’t all that innovative—
MIT’s Open Courseware initiative is a decade old and elite schools like
Yale and Carnegie Mellon have followed suit. The news was that the Stanford
professors were letting students in their global classroom sit for the
midterm, at proctored sites around the world. Those who did well on the A.I.
test and a later final exam got a letter saying so, signed by the professors,
a pair of well-known roboticists from Silicon Valley.
A few days later, MIT made a major announcement: The world-famous research
university would be creating a new non-profit organization called MITx.
It, too, would be offering free online courses, designed from the ground up
to serve tens or even hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. And it,
too, would administer exams to students who, if they passed, would receive a
certificate saying so from MITx.
Then, in January, the online higher education company Straighterline
announced that, starting this year, its students would be able to take skills
and literacy tests developed by ETS, the maker of the SAT, and from the
non-profit Council for Aid to Education, whose well-known Collegiate Learning
Assessment of higher-order critical thinking and communication skills is used
by hundreds of colleges and universities. Those who do well on the exams
will get a certificate saying so. The following week, the Stanford
professors announced the creation of an independent for-profit company called
Udacity, backed by Silicon Valley venture capital, that will offer the same
computer science classes that proved so popular, and, again, certificates to
those who pass exams.
What all of these new ventures have in common is that they are outside of
the existing system of college credits and degrees. The traditional college
degree monopoly has long been sustained by three mutually-reinforcing
factors. First, colleges are highly subsidized through some combination of
direct government funding, non-profit status, and student financial aid.
Second, only accredited colleges can receive government subsidies and offer
credits and credentials that are recognized by employers and other colleges.
The
accreditation system, meanwhile, is controlled by existing colleges
themselves. Third, our society has made an enormous psychic investment in the
idea of traditional colleges. Most people don’t know how to think about
credentials any other way.
Straighterline, Udacity, and MITx exist outside of that system. They aren’
t accredited or subsidized. The value of their credentials will rest on
nothing other than the authority of the grantor and the transparency of the
process by which they were granted. That’s why it’s highly unlikely that
these credentials will be worth as much in the job market as traditional
degrees at first. But in that sense, they fit perfectly with the classic
theory
of disruptive innovation.
DEVELOPED BY Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen, the
theory holds that there is a consistent pattern across a wide range of
industries where disruptive competitors start by competing against
non-consumption
—that is, by selling inferior goods to people who aren’t served by
existing producers. These are generally low-margin businesses that existing
industry leaders have little interest in serving because they became industry
leaders by selling the best, most profitable products to the consumers who
have the most money. But over time, the new competitors get better and better
at providing the product or service, expanding into successively more
profitable parts of the market, until finally they displace the incumbents.
Online colleges like to apply Christensen’s theory to higher education.
But the way they apply it is often imprecise. The common analogy is between
online courses and in-person courses. While an online class might not be as
good as sitting in a classroom being taught in person by a learned
scholar, the thinking goes, online courses are cheaper and getting better all
time
and so will eventually disrupt the providers of live instruction.
But just as people are ultimately interested in buying holes, not drills,
higher education consumers aren’t buying courses or degree programs. They’
re buying credentials. And until now, nobody has developed an innovative
low-cost alternative to traditional higher education credentials. We’re still
stuck with the handful of crude, time-based degrees that have been in use
for decades or more. The vast majority of college students acquire an
associate’s, bachelor’s, or master’s degree, corresponding to two, four, or
six
years attending school.
College credentials are a fantastic product to be selling in the
twenty-first century. They’re pure intellectual property with a very low
marginal
cost of production and becoming more valuable all the time, as the economy
continually reorganizes itself in a way that values the possession of deep
knowledge and complex cognitive skills. They are universally recognized and
never expire, golden keys to the parts of the labor market most worth
entering.
Traditional colleges and universities exploit their monopoly over this
market by overcharging students in order to generate revenue to support things
that are important to them. Those things include producing academic
scholarship, fielding cash-hemorrhaging professional sports teams, engaging in
positional status competition with rival colleges, and avoiding the difficult
work of overhauling inefficient administrative and organizational
structures in which too many people get paid too much money. Online for-profit
colleges haven’t disrupted the industry because while their business methods
are different, their product—traditional credentials in the form of a degree—
is not.
That’s why the recent emergence of new credentials is so significant.
Companies like Udacity and Straighterline can operate without government
subsidies and regulatory protections because their method of service delivery
is
phenomenally cheap at scale. The cost of serving 200 students isn’t that
much less than serving 200,000. The predominant higher education business
model of the future may be one where the education itself costs students
nothing—the availability of free open educational resources is constantly
growing
—and students only pay small fees to cover the cost of assessing their
learning.
The number of organizations offering outside-the-system credentials will
only grow. The free online Khan Academy got tons of press coverage last year
for Salman Khan’s charming instructional videos. Millions of students have
watched them. Khan Academy also offers “badges” to students who pass
certain milestones—“Artisan Arithmetrician,” “Master of Trigonometry,” and
the like. These are just another kind of non-traditional educational
credential. The Mozilla Foundation, funded by the people who developed the
Firefox
web browser, are sponsoring a competition for the creation of badge systems
that will help students organize the credentials they receive from
different providers.
The great unanswered question is when the abundance and quality of new
credentials will reach a critical mass of acceptance among employers and
society at large. Traditional degrees have the great advantage of being simple
and universally understood. The problem is that they provide little
information about what students actually know and are becoming more expensive
all
the time. The catalyst will probably be when some large, authoritative
organization, like the government or a current member of the Dow Jones
Industrial Average, compares the skills and performance of people with
traditional
degrees to those bearing certificates from Khan, Udacity, and
credential-granters yet to come. If the latter can get the job done, they’ll
hire
accordingly, and then everything will start to change.
MIT seems like an early candidate for the General Electric role, the
university that not only outlasts its peers but grows into a huge
world-striding
organization. Unlike Stanford, MIT is putting its brand name behind the
new credentials. It can afford to, because the world will still need places
where great researchers push the frontiers of human knowledge and the best
and the brightest come together to learn. There will always be a market for
boutique educational models that only the wealthy can afford. But for
hundreds of other colleges and universities that lack such advantages or
foresight, the future may not look anything like the past.
Kevin Carey works for Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
____________________________________
(via _Instapaper_ (http://www.instapaper.com/) )
Sent from my iPhone
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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(http://radicalcentrism.org/)
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