When Your State University added an online component of its face-to-face courses in order to optimize its use of brick and mortar classrooms by reducing the number of classroom meeting times per course, it was cost effective.

Now It’s Online and Free

The real disruption, which David Brooks last Thursday likened to that which has already overtaken newspapers and magazines, is about to happen to the elite of the higher education institutions: completely online and  completely free courses.

Most of my local and world news has been freely mine for years. The last time I bought a newspaper was probably 9/11  and that out of shock. I needed something tangible to hold on to. These days I’m not sure how my local newspaper company stays in business. And magazines? The print edition isn’t keeping them in business, more of a convenience or a perk or a side effect of my online subscription.

With Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Michigan, Penn, Princeton, Yale and Carnegie-Mellon professors offering the best of their best online, what will happen to the ‘print edition’ – the college degree?

You scoff. You say I will still need and want, and be willing to pay for, that piece of paper and the invaluable relationships and community derived from a campus where ideas can flow and be freely exchanged in a multiplicity of well-crafted and ad hoc face-to-face encounters . Yes, I think that’s true for many.

But to which of those institutions will those who want (and can pay for) that experience go? How will they evaluate and compare? Will the campus visit be discarded or augmented by a sampling of the best online courses? Will those institutions with  the most credible and engaging online Instructors have the highest application rates?

I’d say some of our nation’s best institutions are banking on it.

Devaluation

By some this may be interpreted as a reaction to another disruption in the force, the devaluation of a college degree. Although debatable as to how the devaluation began, I think we can agree that the combined and systematic factors of recession, spiraling costs, and glut of degrees (sometimes less than meaningful indicators of skill to employers) on the market are yet another indicator.

Portfolio Alternative

Yes, my colleagues, the business of higher ed must change. We must be more fluid, provide more options, become more conversational, do more research and foster more collaboration, and become even more personal – for that is our strength in the midst of all of this, is it not?

Otherwise, the pick-and-choose disruption sends our potential students to create stand alone personal portfolios of their intentional, or cobbled together, meaningful, or haphazard, experiences including exemplary (and free) online courses, and presenting that, with greater and greater finesse and effect, to employers…. without our college degree.

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Yes, in This Context Too 

Our Schools of Business are busting their chops on new curricula, new Centers, new whatevers, to build and create curricula training the next leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, our administrators dally around doing business as usual or responding with incremental movement. With disruptive forces all around us, revolutionary innovation then, must be something we not only teach, but something we also do.

Add’l:

• Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses
• Coursera: The newface of higher education? [video]
• US News Debate Club: Is a College Degree still worth it?
• Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and it’s not the Internet, it’s higher education

Of course, Sakai Project Sites also support these activities, but Sakai servers are not usually set up outside institutions.

Instructure Canvas is another company that also supports these activities, with their “Free for Teachers” version. I don’t know whether it supports open enrollment. Yet. But it will.

It’s a strange reversal for those of us observing this space. The past few years were those in which options seemed to become more and more limited. Without much of a pause, the pendulum now swings to more and more choices. Still, other than whether social media and mobile are supported, the choices don’t have many functional differentiators.

Instead, a main platform differentiator appears to be in the models for provisioning, reuse and interoperability of content. Our appetites are continually expanding for high quality content. Publishers, it’s your turn.

For further reading: “When it Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers”

The competition’s finalists all presented evidence of their proposition’s value addition to the marketplace. This included the ideas which, as solutions, were “solutions” to pretty trivial problems in the grand scheme of things. One of the finalists, for example, will be launching a smartphone app which creates a connection between you and the clubs you attend – effectively moving you to the head of long lines and helping you and your friends decide which club to meet up at that evening.

“Startup Weekend” is a competition. The organizers are out of Portland and have over a thousand such events under their belts. The teams that form around each idea are teams of volunteers (who’ve paid to participate). I think we can all agree pulling a startup idea out of the oven depends on the characteristics, individual and jointly, of the team surrounding the idea. The same was true of winning the competition – but awkwardly enough, not every team knew this.

My view at the table? I participated on the team that formed around the pitch given by a special ed language arts teacher from Ohio. Faced with the K-12 adoption of the Common Core Standards and the need to provide his less able students with enough drill practice to succeed, at least by the standard measurements, his vision was for a software product he and his peers could use that would map practice activities to the standards to progress reports that teachers and administrators could use. Yep, sounds like where I could make a contribution. More than that, sounded like a winner. As a FIRST Lego League robotics coach, I’m regularly exposed to the hype over STEM subjects, and sure enough, there are companies with the goal of building such a software for the Math standards. For Language Arts? Not so much.  I was excited at how this business proposal was a convergence of many areas in which I have experience, not least of these my degree in Applied Linguistics, experience teaching EFL, and as volunteer tech implementor for my kids’ K-8 school. Very cool.

Startup Weekend included local leaders. They spoke about: Social consciousness. Give-back to the community. What we can do for community development.

Here are the dots I’m connecting –

• We hear more almost daily about successful business people who built companies without college. (Forbes: 400: The Self-Made Billionaire Entrepreneurs Who Said No To College // Business Insider: Top 100 Entrepreneurs Who Made Millions Without A College Degree)
• HigherEd responds: Most of our business schools are investing heavily in entrepreneurial programs (Princeton Review: List of top college programs 2011).
• The rise of “Makers,” that is, those who are not dreaming of mass-market made-in-China production, but those who are finding the right quality niche, the right convergence technologies or the right merging of various data sets. Wired Magazine has particularly been covering this angle. A recent article: Want Kids to Win the Future? Turn them into Makers – and Sci-Fi Fans. and their online section: “Meet Wired Design, Your New Bookmark for Cutting Edge D-I-Y Coverage.”
• Press coverage on the devaluation of the college degree, raising the spectre of its value in the near future. This article pretty much covers the spreading skepticism: New York mag: The University Has No Clothes .

Conclusions?

• It’s fairly obvious higher ed will not survive unless we change. We’ve been doing so incrementally: startup weekends, entrepreneurial programs, engineering emphases, interdisciplinary programs, undergrad research angles. Changing traditional brick and mortar schools into something more fluid and flexible is hard.  In many ways we don’t even want to do it. We have our traditions. Time-honored. Founded in #### before the Mayflower. Alumni who send their kids to the school because of the tradition which was so important to them.
• But find out how your alumi have made their money and perhaps you see that they have become what your institution needs to become.
• Less formal. More collaborative. Students – Faculty – Administrators – Businesses building something together for now for the institution and for the student to take with them at graduation. Apprenticeships over Internships?
• Less rigid and traditional. More reconstructive.
• Let’s model in our own business practice the practices we must teach to the next generation.