Technology and the Disruption of Higher Education

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 introduces the three main themes of the book and describes the nature of the transformations and disruptions affecting higher education today. It discusses the challenges schools face and introduces three types of technology-enhanced teaching and learning. The chapter presents some statistics about the state of U.S. universities and asks the question, why do students go to college? This chapter also addresses some of the criticisms of higher education, especially the issues of what students are learning and the costs of college.

Technology-enhanced teaching and learning are both transformational and disruptive to universities. American universities have many great qualities, but a fast response to crisis is not one of them. Schools have ignored these technologies or minimized their possible impact at great peril. As a result, some colleges are going to fail, and others will experience declining quality in applicants and in the faculty attracted to their campuses.

Technology-enhanced teaching and learning are changing the way faculty have taught for hundreds of years, effectively reducing or ending the large lecture and asking students to take more responsibility and do more on their own. The role of the faculty is changing from talking at students to working with them to provide insights into the topics in a course through discussions and problem-solving sessions. The emphasis is on doing, that is, on active learning rather than sitting passively and listening to part of a lecture. As an anecdotal example of this paradigm shift, at the end of a blended course I recently taught, a student thanked me for being a good “facilitator.” Does this approach make sense when one thinks about the purpose of a college education in the twenty-first century?

Can technology enable a revolution in university education? Can it really change the way faculty teach and students learn while maintaining or even increasing quality? Academic quality is an elusive concept and a difficult one to measure. Yet quality is at the heart of the question of whether technology-enhanced teaching and learning can bring about a dramatic reduction in college costs. There are few faculty who would favor reducing quality to lower the costs of college. Some critics of online courses assume that these classes must be of lower quality than an in-person, traditional course.

This part of the book describes the technology that enhances the way faculty teach and students learn. The objective is to provide details on a blended class, an online program, and a MOOC to better understand how this technology can disrupt and transform education.

Some faculty view technology-enhanced teaching as a fad and wish that it would just go away. Other educators believe that there is a revolution going on in higher education that is going to fundamentally change the way we teach and the way students learn. Mike Ball, Senior Associate Dean at the Robert Smith School of Business, called these changes a paradigm shift, meaning that the old ways of doing things are being superseded by a totally new approach.

Blending may be the best of the technology-enhanced approaches to education. It eliminates the tedious live lecture and substitutes it with short videos that students watch on their own. The instructor can also explain ideas through means other than simply a video lecture—for example, through exercises, multimedia presentations, games, and simulations as a part of asynchronous work in the course. Videos of entire lectures have been online for many years through open courseware, so what is different about today's videos?

While on sabbatical in 2011, I began to collect stories about disruptive technologies. It was clear that what might be viewed as a transformational technology by one person was potentially disruptive to others. I also came to realize that my own industry, academia, was facing massive disruptions from technology, government, and society.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are both disrupting and transforming higher education. Since the first MOOCs appeared in 2011, 123 American universities have offered these courses, most of them on one of three major platforms: Coursera, edX, or Udacity. At the time of this writing, more than 1300 MOOCs have been taught or announced. MOOCs have generated much interest and have enthusiastic supporters as well as determined opponents (Vardi, 2012).

Chapter 8 is about deploying the technology; it describes how different types of institutions, ranging from for-profits to schools in developing countries, have made use of the options technology-enhanced teaching offers. The technology provides options, but it also intensifies the competition among schools for students, faculty, and all types of resources.

I have presented three examples of technology-enhanced teaching and learning in some detail: the blended class, the completely online class with synchronous interactive sessions, and the MOOC. These types of courses and variations on them are the building blocks for creating different types of programs and learning experiences for students. Exhibit 8-1 shows the typical way different types of institutions make use of these innovations.

For years, there have been epic rivalries among schools (e.g., Yale versus Harvard, Army versus Navy), but these local rivalries are nothing compared with what is coming. In the near future, schools will compete across a variety of disciplines and geographical regions. Any online program immediately expands the competitive posture of a university. Even for a school on the East Coast, students from California, with a three-hour time difference, will find a way to enroll in an appealing online degree program. When one school licenses the MOOC of another school to use on its campus, there will undoubtedly be an exchange of funds. MOOC producers will compete to capture market share for their productions.

Following the discussion in prior chapters of technology-enhanced teaching and learning and its opportunities and threats, I return now to the topic of quality and cost. The most frequent criticism of universities is with respect to cost and how for decades tuition has risen much faster than the consumer price index. Discussions about quality are heard less often, but few people would suggest that colleges lower their costs by reducing the quality of education. There have to be other ways to save!

Chapter 9 presented rather bleak scenarios for many universities and their faculty and staff, though the picture was much brighter for students. This chapter presents what I believe is a plausible middle ground for where higher education is headed given new opportunities for technology-enhanced teaching and learning. In all fairness, it is necessary to point out that predictions about the future are notoriously inaccurate (Levitt and Dubner, 2014). Levitt and Dubner describe how difficult it is to assign cause and effect in complex systems, and education certainly qualifies as a complex system. The research that Levitt and Dubner summarize suggests that predictions by a large number of experts are not much better than “chimps throwing darts” at options on a bulletin board. I would like to think the predictions in this book are better than what a chimp might do, but readers will have to judge for themselves.

There are predictions that a number of colleges will fail in the next decade, so what should a school do to help ensure its survival? Being an Ivy League college or a large public university will help. It is difficult to envision Yale or Harvard actually failing, though they may find some changes in the environment. Private schools with large endowments and loyal alumni are in a good position as well. It is also inconceivable that Maryland, California, Michigan, and other states that have highly ranked universities would close them. But it is no secret that states have been cutting their support of higher education. Rather than going out of business, these schools may enter a state of gradual decline as competition becomes more intense in higher education.

It is not known how the move toward more technology-based teaching and learning is going to play out. It is clear that a large investment of money, effort, and time to create new courses and programs using the technology will be necessary. Much depends on how administrators and faculty apply these technologies. The start-up shows how one could create a university that has radically different features and cost structure than current colleges.

The following sections are included:

• References
• Appendix