Moving Online for Impact and Survival

The changing and challenging economics of post-secondary education in the United States have created a tsunami of new or re-cast online educational ventures with roots in new technology, traditional distance education, or residential education.

Example ventures (some not so young now) include:

• Technology-based companies such as 2tor or Onsophic;
• Non-traditional educational enterprises with a long history of online education such as Thunderbird School of Global Management or The Fielding Graduate University;
• For-profit or investor-owned entities such as University of Phoenix online; and
• A recent start-up created by Stanford faculty, Udacity, with a focus on bringing university level, internet-based courses to very large classes/cohorts of students.

Further there are a set of new initiatives or ventures built on top of, or organizationally adjacent to, decades-old distance or “professional” learning enterprises at large first rank public and private universities.  Examples include:

• eCornell (now 11 years old)
• Stanford Center for Professional Development
• UC Berkeley Extension
• Michigan State University Online and Off Campus Programs
• Drexel University Online
• Oregon State University ECampus

These new or re-cast online educational offerings are breaking barriers of all kinds:

• MIT is putting its reputation behind completion of online courses in the form of certificates with a new venture called MITx;
• Stanford is putting its reputation behind an online high-school;
• There is evidence that the new forms of online education are dramatically scalable;
• That new forms of online education are not simply the delivery of prepackaged, well-understood material (Physics 101, for example) but topics at the cutting edge of research and graduate education in engineering and science; and
• Online education allows extreme modularization of many types of education, which creates the societal demand for new or expanded forms of validation for certificates.

The fundamental business model for most new generation online post-secondary educational offerings is that tuition and fees cover the full provider cost of delivering the educational services.

It is the issue of cost, and the implications for tuition and accessibility, that make the idea of scalable online education so attractive and which tend to separate new, software and internet enabled approaches from traditional distance education.  Another major difference between traditional education and scalable online education is the investment required.

The recent book, Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses by Taylor Walsh (Princeton University Press, 2010) presents a number of cases of distance or online education, showing in some degree the effort and investment it takes — significant but not overwhelming — to move from simply sharing standard course material through the Internet to designing courses and building software and systems capable of scale.  There are big challenges but it is apparent that post secondary education, both in the US and globally, is characterized by two features:

• Post-secondary educational content is increasingly commoditized and widely available at low or zero cost; and
• A small handful of faculty can produce and update educational content available to thousands of learners.

Part of this transition is that there is an increasingly tight link between scalable, online education and corporate in-house learning systems.   The key technical innovations that makes this possible are growing experiences with online interactive tools such as instant messaging, customer service technology, and collaborative educational software and social network tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

There is a long and growing list of providers of learning system software, including, for example, Digital Chalk or Training Force aimed at corporate markets as well as the open source Moodle, which describes itself as “designed to support a social constructionist framework of education.”  These types of software are proving their value as internal knowledge management, knowledge generation, and shared learning tools.

These technologies are remaking the educational experience because they allow faculty resources to be leveraged to a larger population of students and, most importantly, they enable learner-to-learner communication (student-to-student if you like), with dramatic implications with regard to scaling up the number of students in a track or class while maintaining or improving quality of outcomes.

Impact and Survival

The faculties and administrations of traditional non-profit U.S. universities and colleges tend to be motivated by their missions of public service, contribution to knowledge (research), and education.   And, of course, they are strongly motivated to help their institutions survive, to persist as enterprises.

The competition within, and permanent restructuring of, US post secondary education – driven by economics and enabled by technology and globalization – creates a new set of strategic imperatives for institutions that want to continue to expand their impact and operate in the black.  In particular, institutions may need to look to developing strengths in three areas that have not necessarily been traditional sources of reputation and competitive advantage:

• Development and deployment of scalable course and program content.   Developing and fielding high quality, scalable course ware is not easy and will likely require a host of difficult internal changes, starting with expectations and incentives for faculty.  If, however, a colleges or university (or school or department) plans to migrate a brand associated with high-quality residential education to the online and blended 21st century educational marketplace, this is probably a core competence.
• Effective generation and harvesting of new knowledge for applications.   The hallmark of a research university is the degree to which it can train the next generation of researchers,  provide research-based pedagogy for all students, and contribute to new knowledge and innovation for the good of humankind.  There is no structured “system” for this process at research universities but rather these missions are lodged in the incentive systems for, and governance role of, the faculty.  It is unclear how this non-system will works for an institution where a substantial portion or majority of the students are not in residence.  Institutions that solve this puzzle, hopefully with an uptick in performance of the missions, will have a distinct advantage in competing for the best students, industrial engagement, and research funding.
• Providing education (beyond online course content) that changes life outcomes.    The delivery of course and program content is a small portion of education.  The moves toward modularized, online, non-residential, and life-long education need to be accompanied by institutional innovation in education across a wide range of issues.  It is entirely unclear where this re-invention of post-secondary education will lead but it is clear that — to maintain the value of a degree or certificate — institutions will need to change requirements and processes.  How does someone earning a health sciences or engineering professional degree online get the necessary laboratory and/or clinical education and how does the institution provide it and verify quality?   If students from many locations are in the same online “classroom” what are the standards for classroom participation and processes for team projects?  Institutions that can create demonstrably valuable educational programs that blend online content and learning with other experiences will distinguish themselves as attractive to students at all stages of their work lives.

U.S. post-secondary educational institutions have proven to be remarkably adaptive and long-lived.   It is easy to argue that this is because they have not, in their core mission of education, been forced to change that much in the last sixty years.   The content of an education has changed but the campus, classroom and laboratory experiences of students, as well as the requirements of earning a degree, at a research university today are only modestly changed from 1950.

The changes of the last few years and the next several decades, however, are likely to change the student experience dramatically and challenge universities to adapt at a pace and in ways they have not had to face in living memory.

Going Global –>