Disruption hasn t historically been possible in higher education because there hasn t been an upwardly scalable technology driver available. Yet online learning changes this. Disruption is usually underway when the leading companies in an industry are in financial crisis, even while entrants at the low end of the industry are growing rapidly and profitably. This is currently underway in higher education. Clayton M. Christensen Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver p g g p Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education
What does the growth look like for our college?
What does the growth look like on a larger scale? 50% is at this point Di ti C ll H Di ti Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education p.30
What does the growth look like for kinds of student learning? Text Source: Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. Terry Anderson and Jon Dron
Massive external challenge: Course availability The Usual Suspects: University of Phoenix, WGU, DeVry, Capella, Strayer, et. al. The New Approaches: Open Courseware MIT, University of Illinois, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University s Open Learning Initiative, Washington State Community College s Open Course Library - many more Even newer approaches:mooc Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are large-scale online courses (in the thousands of participants) where an expert or group of experts from a particular field both 1. create the large draw to the course, and 2. facilitate a multi-week series of interactive lectures and discussion forms on critical issues from that field. Participants are expected to self-organize, to share and discuss the course material, and to create and publish new artifacts that represent their learning.
Massive external challenge: Content providers The Established Providers: itunes U, textbook providers, vendors The New Approaches: Khan Academy Ted-Ed (http://education.ted.com/ d ti t d / ) Animators and Game Developers
Massive external challenge: Delivery Platforms The Established Providers: Labs, Libraries, Laptops The New Approaches: Tablets Smartphones And then there s the issue of: Textbooks!
Massive external challenge: Certification The New Approaches: External Reviewers MITx Much of the initial interest in MITx has focused on the certification part and the question of whether or not a letter from MITx will mean much on the job market. If a certificate from MITx (or Udacity or the like) is accepted, so the argument goes, "the jig is up" for higher ed. But by situating MITx as part of the larger educational mission of the school, it appears as though MIT is making a different argument here for its continuing relevancy -- not just as an issuer of diplomas and certificates, but as a source for a "world class education." The New Approaches: Badges d Push is from employers and industry Can focus on fine-grained skills not recognized in classrooms or on transcripts Grant support (MacArthur)
Outside the Box? or Real World Model?
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable «Clay Shirky