Online Education as an Agent of Transformation – NYTimes.com

• Online Education as an Agent of Transformation – NYTimes.com

  Sailboats, steamships, horse and buggy, the many other industries that have failed to anticipate disruptive change have disappeared to be replace by fast changing nimble operators. Legacy operations versus disruptors the disruptors based on history usually win.

  tags: education higher ed online education social media universities colleges transformation

  • And so steam power gained its foothold as a “disruptive innovation” in inland waterways, where the ability to move against the wind, or when there was no wind at all, was important.

  • By the early 1900s, with steam able to power a ship across the ocean on its own, and do so faster than the wind, customers migrated to steamships. Every single transoceanic sailing-ship company went out of business.

  • Traditional colleges are currently on their hybrid voyage across the ocean.

  • Like steam, online education is a disruptive innovation — one that introduces more convenient and affordable products or services that over time transform sectors.

  • And though their approach makes sense in the short term, it leaves them vulnerable as students gravitate toward less expensive colleges

  • But federal financial aid seems to have gummed up the disruption: the easy revenue has encouraged some schools to indiscriminately enroll, often at the expense of quality, and has discouraged cost reduction.

  • Still, the theory predicts that, be it steam or online education, existing consumers will ultimately adopt the disruption, and a host of struggling colleges and universities — the bottom 25 percent of every tier, we predict — will disappear or merge in the next 10 to 15 years

  • Harvard Business School is also developing a series of “pre-M.B.A. and post-M.B.A.” online courses that it plans to have ready by summer. It calls the initiative HBX.

  • But for MOOCs to really fulfill their disruptive potential, they must be built into low-cost programs with certification of skills of value to employers.

  • But perhaps the most promising experiment is from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which next year will start offering a $6,600 online master’s degree, a sixth the price of its current degree, in partnership with the MOOC platform Udacity and AT&T Georgia Tech is putting its reputation behind a MOOC credential.

  • The lessons from any number of industries teach us that those that truly innovate — fundamentally transforming the model, instead of just incorporating the technology into established methods of operation ­ — will have the final say.

  • experience that so many of us remember fondly — those bridge years from childhood to functioning adult — is already one that only a minority of students enjoys.

  • just 30 percent of all beginning students live on a college campus

  • online instruction may mean even more students benefit from the collegial spirit, though one that looks quite different from the residential experience of today.

  • As online learning evolves, students should be able to customize their experience with what they need and can afford. This kind of unbundling has occurred in countless industries.

  • The Minerva Project, a start-up headquartered in San Francisco that aims to provide an affordable liberal arts education, offers clues as to how this might unfold in higher education.

  • To serve them, it will enlist operators to create mini-campuses around the globe where clusters of its students will live and socialize together in residence halls, as well as take online courses and work together on projects.

  • Some students might take courses online and then, to develop their skills, attend learning spaces like Dev Bootcamp in Chicago and San Francisco, or one of General Assembly’s eight locations around the world. Others may just value the flexibility and convenience of a total online learning experience.

  • As concepts and skills are taught more effectively online, it’s unlikely that face-to-face interaction will cease to matter. Instead, students will be able to arrange for such experiences when it suits the job they need to get done.

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