Superb essay by Louis Soares from the Center for American Progress and Amy Ostrom from Arizona State University:
A new “College as a Service” (CaaS) logic can help reframe a substantive debate that pulls together what seem to be very disparate strands of thinking regarding practices and policy. CaaS provides a systemic way of thinking about nettlesome challenges such as how a student’s customer profile of preferences, needs and active participation leads to student success; how information yields accountability; and how self-service can improve higher education. 
Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education’s mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations.
Find out who is changing the game and what we can learn from their different approaches in Game Changers. Download the entire book or individual chapters and case studies below. 
A British perspective but applicable to U.S. higher ed as well.
Innovation regularly transforms the business world, but we have yet to see the equivalent in the university sector.
Almost all universities are geared around either full-time undergraduates, or part-time students who will take the full-time programme over a longer time period. Tuition methods are usually based around lectures and classes, with the exceptions often more conservative still – Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, use tutorials rather than classes, but this again is an old established tradition.
The sector lacks radical entrants. 
In the May issue of Edudemic Magazine for iPad (that won’t be available for a few days, so no pushing and shoving please), we talk about (among many other things) the concept of disruption in education.
Change of all kinds depends on key episodes of disruption–even those that aren’t all roses at the time. For our May issue (which will also be available in our store for those iPad-less), we chose a handful (okay, 21) of the most recent initiatives in education and ranked them according to their potential for disruption–their ability to change education in powerful and even unpredictable ways.
We’ll preview our content a bit more up until launch so you know what you’re getting, but to get started let’s take a look the items below. Feel free to rank your own top 10 in the comments below and see how your list compares to ours when it releases next week. 
Today, Harvard University jumped on the accelerating online-education train. The creation of edX in partnership with MIT marks the latest development in what’s shaping up to be a fascinating contest between the nation’s leading research universities and its most ambitious private-sector entrepreneurs for domination of virtual higher education.
Things began heating up last December. Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so. Then MIT announced the creation of MITx, a new nonprofit organization, branded by the university, which would also offer so-called Massively Open Online Courses, or “MOOC’s,” and would also offer certificates to those who earned them–a new kind of academic currency. In January, some of the Stanford professors broke off from the university and formed a new for-profit company called Udacity, designed to offer the same MOOC’s, sans Stanford. In March, some of the other Stanford professors formed another company, Coursera, which will offer courses from Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, and Penn, also online, also for free. 
The universities announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, that will offer vast new learning opportunities for students around the world.
Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project to be known as MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but will carry no credit. 
Throughout American history, almost every generation has had substantially more education than that of its parents. That is no longer true.
This development already has broad ramifications across the U.S. job market: Those with only a high-school diploma had an 8% unemployment rate in March, roughly double that of college graduates, who had a 4.2% unemployment rate.
More serious consequences may be felt in the future. Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won't be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy.
There is also growing skepticism among some Americans about whether a college degree actually translates into a well-paying job. Particularly during the recent recession, there have been gluts of college graduates in some industries and shortages in others. 
Some of us are still waiting for higher education's Nicholas Carr moment—the point at which it becomes clear to everyone that technology doesn't matter. Carr's 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "Why IT Doesn't Matter," threw sand in the gears of the information-technology industry by pointing out the obvious: Building strategy around a competitive necessity is simply a bad idea.
A Nicholas Carr moment for higher education would cause us to look at what increasingly capable and ubiquitous technology can accomplish, and to conclude that there is nothing strategic about it. Such technology is a competitive necessity, like water and electricity. We should stop arguing about it and concentrate on what will make universities great, because without a fundamental change in the business of higher education, technology doesn't matter. 
MIT has launched an initiative in collaboration with Khan Academy founder Salman Khan called MIT+K12 that encourages its students to produce short videos teaching basic concepts in science and engineering.
The videos — aimed at students in grades from kindergarten through high school — will be accessible through a dedicated MIT website and YouTube channel. Some of the videos will also be available on Khan Academy, a popular not-for-profit educational site.
“We wanted to help inspire young people to change the world through engineering and science, and realized that the 10,000 superstar students we have at MIT are uniquely positioned to do that,” says Ian A. Waitz, dean of the School of Engineering and the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “Our students have responded with all the energy and enthusiasm we knew they would. We worked with them to design the program, and the results are fantastic.” 
YouTube holds a rich trove of videos that could be used in the classroom, but it’s challenging to transform videos into a truly interactive part of a lesson. So the nonprofit group TED has unveiled a new Web site that it hopes will solve this problem—by organizing educational videos and letting professors “flip” them to enhance their lectures. ![Why Change is [very] Good for Education | Disrupting Higher Ed | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/FNYZG_5PYAJxIOerEKLeWjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
What do you think about change and education? ‘Change’ and ‘education’ spoken in the same sentence has been compared to mixing oil and water. But is education more resistant to change than any other institution, corporation, government bureau, etc? I don’t think so. Yet I’m sure you’ll agree that change is hard, not natural, yet being adaptable, fluid and open to new ideas leads to good things… creative, crazy, innovative and even life change things. Via Ana Cristina Pratas 
For Anant Agarwal, MITx, the Institute’s new online-learning initiative, isn’t just a means of democratizing education. It’s a way to reinvent it.
A decade ago, MIT broke ground with its OpenCourseWare initiative, which made MIT course materials, such as syllabi and lecture notes, publicly accessible. But over the last five years, MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif has led an effort to move the complete MIT classroom experience online, with video lectures, homework assignments, lab work — and a grade at the end.
Michael Crow, the ubiquitous president of Arizona State University, opened the Education Innovation Summit here this week by giving his views of what ails higher ed. He called it “filiopietism,” or the excessive veneration of tradition. Not enough students are coming into the system, he said, and not enough are completing a credential to reach national goals. Quoting his father, Crow called this a “piss-poor performance.”
I’ve seen Crow give similar keynote presentations to graduate-school deans and college presidents in recent months, although those speeches didn’t seem as hard-nosed as this one. He admitted upfront that this audience probably would be more sympathetic to his message of what’s wrong with higher ed than those other two were.
Before him were 800 people, mostly educational entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors, who more than outnumbered the contingent of college administrators and educators at the conference, which is now in its third year. |
Senior campus technology leaders should be held accountable for developing and delivering on plans to:
Every project that technology touches (which now means most things we do in higher ed) should be looked at through the lenses of quality, access and costs. It is no longer adequate to address one or two legs of this three legged stool.
The role that technology plays to increase quality and access is perhaps more apparent than the ability of technology to reduce costs. We are comfortable thinking about ROI invested in supporting and running our learning platforms. And to the extent that educational professional headcount (such as learning designers) falls under the computing budget we can draw a straight line between investments and results. The growth of open educational resources and open online courses are clear examples of the role that technology can play in improving access.
How can technology drive down higher ed costs? Here are 4 suggestions... 
Lectures are often the least educational aspect of college; I know, I’ve taught college seniors and witnessed how little students learn during their four years in higher education. So, while it’s noble that MIT and Harvard are opening their otherwise exclusive lecture content to the public with EdX, hanging a webcam inside of a classroom is a not a “revolution in education”.
A revolution in education would be replacing lectures with the Khan Academy and dedicating class time to hands-on learning, which is exactly what Stanford’s medical school proposed last week. Stanford realizes that great education comes from being surrounded by inspiring peers, being coached by world-class thinkers, and spending time solving actual problems. 
The Saylor Foundation has been building an online catalog of free, self-paced college courses since 2010. But students who completed those courses could not typically earn credit toward a degree, since the nonprofit group is not an accredited institution. Saylor’s new partnership with the online course-provider StraighterLine seeks to change that, giving students an inexpensive way to earn academic credit using freely available materials. 
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web and online learning. It's become much cheaper and easier to put college courses online, and new technologies have only made these classes more valuable.
“Do you actually believe in this stuff?” one of my colleagues at The Chronicle asked me last week.
The stuff he was referring to were the disruptive innovations that are supposed to revolutionize how higher ed is delivered in this country, a topic I’ve been writing a lot about lately.
I had just returned from the Education Innovation Summit at Arizona State University, a gathering that had attracted some 800 educational entrepreneurs, CEO’s, and investors to hear talks about the future of education and see demonstrations from more than 100 companies promising to bring massive change to the tradition-bound industry.
As I considered his question, I started to tell him about recent campus visits that had much more of an impact on my thinking about this subject than the Arizona conference. 
Student loans are just a piece of the puzzle of higher education.
That you can’t gain a competitive edge with just any diploma from just any college is reflected in the ferociousness of the race to get into elite universities. It’s madness out there. Tiger mothers and $125-an-hour tutors proliferate, and parents scrimp and struggle to pay up to $40,000 a year in tuition to private secondary schools that then put them on the spot for supplemental donations, lest the soccer field turn brown and the Latin club languish. The two Americas are evident in education as perhaps nowhere else.
Trying to keep higher learning as affordable as possible is a crucial effort to collapse that divide. No good can come from letting college — as a goal, as an option — slip away. But as a guarantor of a certain quality of life, it already has. And we need to look at a whole lot more than loan rates to fix the problem. 
More colleges are experimenting with online-learning platforms to meet the growing demand for higher education and to increase revenue in the face of budget cuts. But the next generation of online-learning systems faces several barriers to adoption, according to a new report.
Chief among them are professors’ desires to customize what they teach and their reluctance to use prepackaged course material. The most sophisticated of today’s online-learning systems rely on machine-guided instruction to adapt lessons to the needs of individual students. But most of those systems do not yet allow instructors to deeply tailor the material to meet their course needs. And highly-interactive systems are often too complex for pioneering professors to adopt and sustain on their own. 
Applies to Higher Ed as well as Corporate America:
These days, every established company is at risk of having its industry--and its own business--disrupted by a startup. Cognizant of this, companies devote a lot of time to talking about how important it is to innovate. But here’s the truth: most companies can’t innovate because everyone is paid to maintain the status quo.
This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.
Instead of innovating on your weekends, overcome the structural impediments and time constraints to real change by approaching innovation from two directions: outside-in and inside-out.
“Outside-in,” when not based on acquisition, often comes in the form of a skunkworks project. It’s colloquially defined as a startup funded by the parent company, but kept separate from the dysfunction and sluggishness of the whole, 
You could call it a bubble, but it's more like a ball and chain. Bubbles are, after all, light and airy.
The collective weight of American student debt is now over $1 trillion, and that weight is a drag not just on those paying the debt, but on our entire economy. It's hard to calculate exactly, because the lenders are notoriously unwilling to hand over their data, and with students defaulting at ever-higher rates, interest rates and fees are always changing, adding constantly to the weight of the burden college graduates (and those who didn't graduate but still have to pay off the loans they took out in more hopeful times) carry. 
Far be it from me to oppose the democratization of education. I’m a big fan of the idea, which in its most recent manifestation focuses heavily on the potential of technology to bring more educational opportunities to more people than ever before in history. But what do we really mean by the ubiquitous “democratization” phrase? How does aspirational talk about using technology to upend convention translate into concrete action? I’ve been mulling over two divergent strands in educational philosophy that seem to be emerging, each with quite different implications for how techno-reformers ought to proceed. 
Want to calculate how much you could owe in student loans after graduating from a particular college? A new government website provides tools to help with the math. |
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