Educational Innovation and Distance Education

So, what will education look like ten years from now? I highly doubt that higher education will lose the need for a physical place, the actual campus, with faculty and staff who interact with students in classes and on a person-to-person basis

So, what will education look like ten years from now? I highly doubt that higher education will lose the need for a physical place, the actual campus, with faculty and staff who interact with students in classes and on a person-to-person basis. However, how we teach will change, even more than it has to date.

Technology is ever-advancing and our students with it. Students multitask by watching TV, while texting friends, reading an assignment on their computer or tablet device, and checking their Facebook account. Students will have a very difficult time focusing on one thing at a time; for example, a faculty member giving a lecture.  Education will need to keep up with technology, providing students the opportunity to multitask while learning in the classroom.

Faculty may need to provide "lectures" in small increments and then ask students to search the web for examples, case studies, or counter arguments. They will need to utilize the vast amount of web video available to educate and entertain students. Group work will continue to grow in its importance in higher education. Students will need to interact with each other to learn to communicate face-to-face and not just by texting.

Naysayers argue the brave new “massive open online course” world of giving away free online classes by great academics from many of the world’s best institutions will destroy the business model of the university

Universities are putting real money into developing their own Moocs to  project brand and identify talent globally. They also want to experiment in new  pedagogy and, they hope, inspire their troops to be better teachers.  Universities certainly do not want their core business of granting degrees  disrupted, and clearly they do not think they are doing so by investing in  Moocs.

Neither do for-profit Mooc platforms such as Coursera. Signs are they may  well be able to drive revenue from certificates of completion and licensing  content to universities. They just are not contemplating crossing the Rubicon  into degrees, which would put them at odds with the universities on whom they  depend for content.

The institutions will design courses to train students to grapple with the floods of data now available in business, science, and other fields

IBM is expanding its push to encourage the study of "big data" through a brace of new partnerships with prominent universities and a new round of grants to support data-analytics pursuits in academe, the company announced on Wednesday.

Georgetown University, George Washington University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Northwestern University are among the nine institutions and higher-education agencies worldwide that will introduce new curricula developed in partnership with the computer company.

George Washington, Rensselaer, Ireland's Dublin City University, and the National University of Singapore are each introducing new master's degrees with a big-data emphasis. The other participating institutions—the University of Missouri, India's Mother Teresa Women's University, and universities overseen by the Philippines Commission on Higher Education—are introducing graduate and undergraduate courses.

Naysayers argue the brave new “massive open online course” world of giving away free online classes by great academics from many of the world’s best institutions will destroy the business model of the university

Universities are putting real money into developing their own Moocs to  project brand and identify talent globally. They also want to experiment in new  pedagogy and, they hope, inspire their troops to be better teachers.  Universities certainly do not want their core business of granting degrees  disrupted, and clearly they do not think they are doing so by investing in  Moocs.

Neither do for-profit Mooc platforms such as Coursera. Signs are they may  well be able to drive revenue from certificates of completion and licensing  content to universities. They just are not contemplating crossing the Rubicon  into degrees, which would put them at odds with the universities on whom they  depend for content.