Group items tagged

among 27 potential factors, the U.S. News ranking came in at #20 in terms of importance in students' decision-making process. Twice as many students said that rankings were "not important at all" as those who said that they were "very important." So what do students care about? The top four factors were majors, cost, safety, and employment.3

We are beginning to see a similar shakeout in higher education. In a survey of 368 small private colleges and midsize state universities, 38 percent failed to meet their 2014–15 budget for both freshman enrollment and net tuition revenue.

If they can truly provide premium programs with a high return on investment, they will be able

to continue to charge high tuition. What they must not do—if they want to survive—is stand still.

Forced to demonstrate definitive value, midtier institutions will have to decide what they want to be when they grow up. If they're in the business of providing basic degree programs—where value to the student accrues primarily as a result of the credential itself—they will become a discount provider: delivering the program as inexpensively as possible.

"a full stack education company might not look like a school at all. It could look like an employer, a lender, a school, and/or a recruiter all rolled into one."6

The good news for students is that following this hollowing out, institutions will provide a higher return on investment.

premium providers will utilize technology for some delivery but will focus on immersive, intensive, employer-focused and -facing experiences for students

In fact, it's conceivable that the only remaining institutions with a return-on-investment profile characteristic of today's market will be the elite colleges and universities that have set the pace for higher education until now.

Full-stack providers that hope to achieve the higher education equivalent of Apple's or Uber's success will have to find a way to do three fundamental things: (1) develop and deliver specific high-quality educational experiences that produce graduates with capabilities that specific employers desperately want; (2) work with students to solve financing problems; and (3) connect students with employers during and following the educational experience and make sure students get a job.

In a decade, online education may be recognized not for making higher education accessible to anyone with a smartphone but, rather, for serving as the midwife who delivered competency-based learning into the world. Although competency-based learning is theoretically possible in a non-technology-enabled environment, it's not nearly as simple and appealing. In a competency-based environment, transfer credits become an anachronism and failure becomes a relic. In a competency-based world, the 41 percent of students who start but don't complete degree programs within six years will still receive value from the competencies they can show to prospective employers.15 Equally important, in our experience, competency-based learning reduces the cost of delivery by half over standard online delivery. Astute providers will pass the savings along to students and become leaders in the new discounter segment.

Some coding bootcamps even guarantee employment or tuition is refunded

the real higher education story of the decade is the crisis of affordability

The average bachelor's degree recipient who has taken out student loans carries $28,400 in debt, and 26 million consumers have two or more open student loans on their credit report.

Between 1999 and 2011, outstanding student loan debt grew by 511 percent; as of early 2014, it exceeded $1 trillion, more than credit card debt.10

In 1979, a typical student could pay his/her way through college working at the minimum wage for 182 hours, the equivalent of a part-time summer job. In 2013, the same student at the same college at the present-day minimum wage would have to work over 991 hours (a full-time job for half the year) just to cover tuition while still needing to find additional resources to pay for living expenses.11 In addition, the wealth gap between young and old has also never been wider. At the end of 2011, the typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older had a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, a number that more than doubled since 2005

in our current isomorphic system price continues to serve as a signal of quality

As a result, most institutions offering online programs have done so at the same price point as their on-ground programs; to do otherwise would send the wrong signal for a medium that is still young and thirsting for academic legitimacy.

If any product or service should be designed so that a stoned freshman can figure it out, it should be higher education.

Despite this, higher education may be the most complex product or service purportedly designed for mass consumption. This is not a comment on the difficulty of the subject matter being taught in the classroom; rather, it is a comment on the opaque and complex process of enrolling, financing, and ultimately assembling a degree. Focus groups conducted at Macomb Community College in Michigan, offering 200 degree and certificate programs to 48,000 students, revealed that very few students were able to navigate the complexities of enrollment, financial aid, transcript requests, prior credit recognition, program selection, and course selection/scheduling.

Because of the flawed transfer-credit system, students have difficulty identifying pathways toward a degree if they're changing institutions—something that a large percentage of them will do over the course of their studies.

To be successful in improving outcomes, higher education must turn the current process of program design on its head. Traditional program design is based on a system of credit hour inputs rather than outcomes. This has resulted from a culture of faculty-focused curricular development, which moves from an established curriculum to assessment and then to learning outcomes. A simpler, better system would be reverse-engineered by starting with student outcomes, then moving to the assessments that prove that the outcomes have been achieved, and only then turning to the question of what curricula best prepare students for the assessments. Fortunately, technology allows higher education to make this shift.

Even more shocking, approximately half of institutions that claimed to hit budget were reporting against downward-revised budget numbers.5

Technology's efficacy goal for online learning should be to move "focus by choice" as far as possible in the direction of "controlled focus." Two sets of technologies will accomplish this.

Combining adaptive learning with competency-based learning is the "killer app" of online education. Students will progress at their own pace. When they excel on formative assessments integrated into the curricula, they are served up more-challenging learning objects. And when students struggle, adaptive systems throttle back until the student is ready for more.

The second technology is gamification

believing that the solution to the smartphone challenge is simply allowing mobile access to the same online course is tantamount to believing that an institution's online strategy is effectively addressed by putting lectures on YouTube or iTunes.

In other industries, unbundling has driven fundamental change. Over the past decade, sales of recorded music are down 50 percent and continue to fall each year.

Where does this leave the higher education bundle? At present, degrees remain the currency of the labor market. But as currency, they're about as portable as the giant stone coins used on the island of Yap. What if technology could produce a finer currency that would be accepted by consumers and employers alike?

neither dot-com entrepreneurs nor MOOCs have produced courseware that is truly disruptive to higher education.

What if that is because the software that will disrupt higher education isn't courseware at all? What if the software is, instead, an online marketplace? Uber (market cap $40 billion) owns no vehicles. Airbnb (market cap $10 billion) owns no hotel rooms. What they do have are marketplaces with consumer-friendly interfaces. By positioning their interfaces between millions of consumers and sophisticated supply systems, Uber and Airbnb have significantly changed consumer behavior and disrupted these supply systems. Is there a similar marketplace in the higher education arena? There is, and it has 40 million college students and recent graduates on its platform. It is called LinkedIn.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has been very clear about his ambition, stating in November 2014: We want to have a profile for every member of the global work force, all 3 billion-plus people. We want to have a profile for every company in the world—that's north of 70 million companies—and digital representation of every job in the world. We also want digital representation of every skill required to obtain those jobs, a digital presence for every university in the world, and we want to make it easy for every individual company and university to share their professionally relevant knowledge. In doing all of this, we hope to allow all forms of capital to flow to where it can best be leveraged to lift and transform the global economy.2

Competency marketplaces will profile the competencies (or capabilities) of students and job seekers, allow them to identify the requirements of employers, evaluate the gap, and follow the educational path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost-effectively.

It could be the "software" that Andreessen foretold and that colleges and universities have long feared.

As competency marketplaces and their associated algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, employers and students will begin to value the signals from these tools more than the signals from nonelite universities' bundled degrees. (The signals from elite universities' bundled degrees will remain strong, largely due to the high caliber of the inputs.) As employees who are matched on the basis of competencies (and then hired through standard interviewing techniques for behavioral and cultural fit) excel in the workplace, this trend will only be reinforced. Employers will adjust job descriptions to reflect the incoming competencies of high-performing candidates, and competency matches will get better and better.

At some point, a student will walk into the college admissions office and say: "I've read your programs of study, and your Environmental Engineering program looks interesting. But how will it help me take my competency profile from where it is today to where LinkedIn says it needs to be in order to get an entry-level job as an engineer?" Colleges and universities that offer competency-based programs will at least speak the same language as this student. That's necessary, but not sufficient. A sufficient response will require unbundling the degree.

Likewise, colleges and universities may soon transition from the bloated degree model to an "Education-as-a-Service" (EaaS) model. Successful providers will sell students what they need when they need it: a "just-in-time" educational model that is much closer to today's coding schools than current degree programs.

Each of these is a potential revenue stream for competency marketplaces, either from the employer or from the education provider.

If ownership is held by the competency marketplace, we may find ourselves in a world where there's more money to be made from owning the competency profile than from delivering postsecondary education.

To avoid marginalization, colleges and universities need to insist that individuals own their competencies. Ensuring that ownership lies with the individual could make the competency profile portable and could facilitate movement across marketplaces, as well as to higher education institutions. In an era of unbundling, when colleges and universities need to move from selling degrees to selling EaaS subscriptions, the winners will be those that can turn their students into "students for life"—providing the right educational programs and experiences at the right time. This becomes possible when individuals own their competencies and allow institutions to manage their profiles, suggesting educational programs and even employment.

In the coming years, many institutions will succumb to the current inertia that is too prevalent in higher education. Some institutions will address some of these issues and will survive. Others will successfully address most of these issues and will then need to prepare for the next seismic change in higher education: The Great Unbundling.

The registry will include all kinds of credentials – from educational degrees and certificates to industry certifications, occupational licenses, and micro-credentials.

will develop a Credential Directory app, which will allow registry users to access the websites of participating credential issuers, build customized directories of credentials based on their own criteria, and publish the results.

The goals are transparency and clarity, and to help align credentials with the needs of students, job seekers, workers and employers.

we have not been consistent and mindful in imbuing non-cognitive and behavioral elements directly into courses and programs to increase student success (i.e. elements for first generation, high-poverty, and high-minority students), and we have not fundamentally challenged the structure of the traditional degree (i.e. vs. stackable credentials with pathways to multiple degree options).

heutagogy

Serving transfer students better is one of the few ways to make a significant, positive impact on the cost of college and degree completion, without the need for new regulations. Every transfer student who has earned postsecondary credits must have a basic set of rights associated with turning those credits into a degree and that degree into opportunity. A bill of rights will help do just that.

students transferring to public institutions benefit from the highest rate of credit acceptance: 20 percent more than students transferring to private non-profit colleges and 52 percent more than students transferring to private for-profit colleges. It’s not clear what academic interests explain this disparity, especially among top public and private colleges.

we need a Transfer Student’s Bill of Rights that guarantees access to degree programs, sequences, and prerequisites guiding higher education to do a much better job in serving the nation’s transfer students.

That means ensuring all students understand what prior courses will transfer to their new institutions before choosing their next university.

It means having access to data from all colleges and universities about their track record accepting credit and the fine print.

Central to transfer students’ rights is an imperative that every higher education institution adopt an infrastructure for electronic student records exchange, so that credits can be discovered and processed in an efficient, effective and timely manner.

Few realize that in higher education today, we have the equivalent of thousands of local railroads, each with its own gauge track. Our independent, decentralized system of higher education has many strengths, but if we are to lead the world in degree attainment our colleges and universities must be equipped with the same institution-to-institution record exchange capabilities that sectors such as finance put in place years ago.

Benjamin Bratton has argued: "'Innovation' defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo."3

Will a countervailing vision of grassroots, generative innovation dedicated to strengthening higher education do better?4 If we think the open web and public education are ideas worth preserving, we have no option but to try to find out.

The demands of sustaining infrastructure have continued to dominate institutional priorities, and the recent promise of Web 2.0 has been unevenly integrated into campus strategies: instances of broad, culture-shifting experimentation along these lines in higher education can be counted on one hand

Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what's necessary rather than what's possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.

Higher education overall, perhaps concerned about the untamed territories of the open web and facing unquestionably profound challenges in extending its promise beyond the early adopters, cast its lot with a "system" that promised to "manage" this wild potential and peril.

before we even begin to encounter the software itself, we privilege a mindset that views learning not as a life-affirming adventure but instead as a technological problem, one that requires a "system" to "manage" it.

But environments matter, and disturbingly often these systems promote formulaic and rigid instruction.

There is a discussion to be had about where/when student interactions might merit or benefit from some degree of privacy and where/when we need to consider protections of identity and personal privacy. But that discussion happens too rarely; it is easier to default to locking everything behind digital slabs of access controls and inaccessible online spaces. Worse yet, this enclosure not only cuts the academy off from the wider world but also cuts students off from each other and the institution. Courses are severely limited in the ability to access other courses even within the institution (so much for "connecting silos"), and when courses end, students are typically cast out, unable to refer to past activity in their ongoing studies or in their lives (so much for "promoting lifelong learning").

even in an era when it is widely understood that we need to guide our students into an information age of immense complexity, promise, and uncertainty, we force them to spend countless hours on computers in a virtual environment that does nothing to equip them with practical web skills

And any technologists who have been involved in a migration from one system to another, or in significant upgrades of the same system, can testify to how time-consuming and troublesome these processes will be. As Martin Weller argues: "This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution.

LMSs are seen as, at best, a "necessary evil." But perhaps they're not so necessary.

Before directing activity to a complex, locked-down system, ask: "Do we really need to do it this way? Is there a simpler, cheaper, open alternative that will do the job?"

, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have become the poster child of innovation in higher education over the last two to three years. This approach was started by two Canadians — George Siemens and Stephen Downes — at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2008. The professor (Siemens) and the government researcher (Downes) decided to put into practice the connectivism and connected learning theories that they had been writing about and experimenting with for years. Their 2008 course, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK08), christened the idea of the MOOC and provided a brilliant example of educational technology praxis using the open web. Significantly, these origins of the MOOC arguably mark it as the first web-native learning environment, as opposed to e-learning that grafts old-style distance learning onto online platforms.

Yet within a couple of years, the experimentation and possibility of the MOOC movement had become co-opted and rebranded by venture capitalists as a fully formed, disruptive solution to the broken model of higher education.11 The most distressing part of the story is that many higher education administrators and even IT professionals seem to have little or no idea where the innovation started.

One encouraging result of the MOOC mania is the rising interest in open online learning, even if in this case innovation has become synonymous with how to scale a single course for many users.

MOOCs, currently being reimagined (and resold) by proprietary environments designed for scale and simplicity, lack the basic Web 2.0 premises of aggregation, openness, tagging, portability, reuse, multichannel distribution, syndication, and user-as-contributor.

Imagine what higher education institutions could do if they started approaching academic publishing platforms as collaborative, open spaces for community-authored materials. What if educational institutions start reclaiming innovative learning on the web?14

One risk, according to the auditor, was that colleges and universities would create programs that were just correspondence courses, without any meaningful interaction between students and faculty. Another risk was that students might receive Title IV federal funding for their life experience, without using the school’s learning resources.

the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, had approved the school’s first competency-based degree program: a master's of health professions. The distance learning program is aimed at working professionals in medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and social work.

The program doesn’t have traditional campus-based classes — its students interact with mentors by phone, email, video chat, or, for students and mentors near each other, in person.

The Flexible Option program at University of Wisconsin System offers five competency-based online certificates and degrees, targeting adult students with college credits but no degrees.

Wisconsin won approval from the Education Department and an accreditor for its self-paced, direct assessment arts and sciences associate’s degree.

The program is “transdisciplinary” — open to students in any discipline — with a theme-based organization and learning driven by problem-solving instead of how much time is spent in the classroom.

students receive credit based on learned and demonstrated competencies.

Western charges a flat-rate tuition for every six months of enrollment, and students’ advancement is based on what they can prove they know

The 2-year-old program has partnered with 55 employers to create programs for job-specific skills. College for America claims to be the only program of its kind to be approved by a regional accrediting agency and by the Department of Education for Title IV federal financial aid, although the Education Department says there is one other.

The university allows students to receive credit for knowledge already gained through their experience with a “prior learning assessment.” As of Jan. 23, Capella and Southern New Hampshire had the only two programs approved by the Department of Education to receive Title IV financial aid, according to the department.

Northern Arizona University offers a competency-based online learning program, called Personalized Learning, that allows students to use their previous experience to pass pretests and opt out of certain lessons.

is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.