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In this new world, providing students smarter pathways into and through higher education will be critical. All learning should count. Everyone should know what degrees represent so they can be put to use most effectively, whether it’s for employment or further education, and everyone should know the next step they need to take to move toward their personal goals.

At its root, we need to rethink and reimagine the entire premise of higher education. We must ask ourselves what type of product we want to be sold and produced by the nation’s colleges and universities and other providers of postsecondary learning.

“Many of those who have lived and learned in colleges as we know them cherish their memory and institutions,” Carey writes, “But the way we know them is not the only way they can be. Our lifetimes will see the birth of a better, higher learning.”[11]

The model is fundamentally different, however, than any other adult bachelor programs that you’ve heard of. Students will pay a flat subscription fee of $2,250 for three month’s of “all you can eat” access. During that time. they’ll be able to use the school’s instructional content online, its advisors, and other resources. More importantly, they’ll be welcome to try to pass as many “competency tests” as they want.

“We are in essence creating a virtual university--a new one,” says Ray Cross, Chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension. “What is a full-time student in a self-paced competency-based model? Well, we’ve got to define that.”

Only 10 students will be accepted for each degree program in January 2014, but as the program expands, Cross says the “sky is the limit,” especially given how many students are open to self-taught online courses around the world.

this year's survey results point to technology as a way to increase students' participation in class and to more efficiently complete assigned work or digest course materials. Students identified other ways to improve their learning experience, including: 61% of students said that homework that is more interactive, containing elements such as video, would improve learning 48% of students said their learning would be enhanced by technology that helps them collaborate digitally with students from their class, or from other schools 61% cited the ability to exchange instant feedback with professors as something that would improve learning 55% said digital learning that personalizes their learning experience (i.e. gives teachers the ability to track student progress in real-time) would be useful

As for the actual devices students use for their studies, laptop ownership remains steady at 90% of survey respondents for 2014 and 91% for 2015, while students owning smartphones and those owning iPads or tablets both increased by 7 percentage points in 2015 vs. the previous year. The number of surveyed students owning smartphones increased from 83% in 2014 to 90% in 2015 and tablet ownership increased from 43% in 2014 to 50% in 2015.

Students' expectation for access to technology in higher education continues to increase, as does the overall cost of receiving a college degree. Accordingly, the financial burden of tuition continues to be a major concern among college students, with 81% of those surveyed agreeing that over the next 10 years, fewer students will go to college because it is too expensive. For those who do pursue a degree, the cost of doing so is a long-term commitment: 54% of students surveyed this year are worried they won't be able to pay off their college loans before they are 50, in contrast to 44% of students who responded similarly to this statement in 2014

1995 Change magazine

Robert B. Barr and John Tagg

“A paradigm shift is taking hold in American higher education. In its briefest form, the paradigm that has governed our colleges is this: A college is an institution that exists to provide instruction. Subtly but profoundly we are shifting to a new paradigm: A college is an institution that exists to produce learning. This shift changes everything. It is both needed and wanted.”

AAC&U's GEMs project and WICHE's Interstate Passport Initiative.3

Fundamental questions surrounding CBE, where we still lack an agreed-upon taxonomy and nomenclature

Those changes were painful, and many stakeholders, unable to adjust to a new industry ecosystem, disappeared or were greatly diminished. Higher education, infinitely more complicated, may nevertheless be on the cusp of a similar revolution, leading to a new higher education ecosystem.

MOOC platform providers are also “discovering” that students want to pay for credentials and not learning experiences. This means that many of those companies are tying their fortunes to the issuing of certificates and badge-like credentials. This business model will succeed as long as MOOCs are a tiny fraction of their partner university’s offerings but will run into significant headwinds once adoption grows and they compete more directly with the core institutional financial models.

“scalable educational experiences.”

bally connected and mixed-modality learning communities can be enhanced and accelerated by MOOC platforms and, more importantly, new thinking. Such possibilities more accurately reflect the thinking of the earliest MOOC pioneers, George Siemens and Steven Downes. These new possibilities will take advantage of the best of what we can do in physical and virtual spaces. Expect to see new learning genres and expanded access to the deep knowledge generated by our great universities.

The MOOC Is Dead! Long Live Open Learning!

We’re at a curious point in the hype cycle of educational innovation, where the hottest concept of the past year–Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs–is simultaneously being discovered by the mainstream media, even as the education-focused press is declaring them dead

Can MOOCs really be growing and dying at the same time?

ought to write a companion book -- a sequel to The End of College -- called The End of Sex. The argument would go like this: Disruptive innovations in virtual technologies everywhere are rendering residential sex obsolete. Match.com is clearly more efficient than old, clumsy courtship rituals, and improved algorithms will obviate the need entirely for bar hopping. Virtual sex is disease-free and quantifiable. Advancements in robotics, tactile interactivity, customizable AI, and neuro-scientific sensory mapping are all conspiring to supplant old-school face-to-face sexuality. Virtual sex is market-friendly and doesn't rely on unfair status credentials. Carey will probably make good money if he puts forth The End of Sex book, and he'll be able to laugh at stodgy PhDs all the way to the bank.

discounts the value of face-to-face human relations and overlooks the inherent (and irreplaceable) joy of such encounters. Many (we'd say most) professors and students do what they do, not because they are motivated primarily by status or job concerns, but because they love learning and learning with others.

David Schejba

dean of continuing education, outreach and e-learning at the University of Wisconsin-Extension

his career has been driven by a desire to make education flexible, affordable and accessible for working adults, some of whom have degrees and are looking for new skills, some of whom have no prior postsecondary experience, but all of whom have real commitments outside of schooling

on a global level there is an understanding that education needs to evolve to meet the needs of our students in a modern world

it is interesting to note that the challenges faced at one phase of level exist just as much at later stage

our knowledge of the processes of learning rather than our subject knowledge is what matters most

While MOOCS are hardly a step forward pedagogically, they have brought distance learning out of the shadows and into daily discourse about the future of higher education.

The lines between for-profit and not-for-profit are blurring as partnerships evolve between community colleges offering two-year diplomas and for-profit colleges awarding the bachelor’s degree. For-profit corporations now provide the platform and technical know-how for expanding the reach of not-for-profit master’s programs at many major universities.

Educational technologies will need to be employed for building new models of learning

"I wanted to avoid the usual doom and gloom—the usual 'it's all crap and there's no hope for the future,'

it's about people who are out of the box of education completely who are trying to improve the system."

pedagogical approach that employs technology that serves new models of learning—and not just for the sake of having the newest gadget in the lab.

online competency-based education stands out as the innovation most likely to disrupt higher education.

As traditional institutions struggle to innovate from within and other education technology vendors attempt to plug and play into the existing system, online competency-based providers release learning from the constraints of the academy. By breaking down learning into competencies—not by courses or even subject matter—these providers can cost-effectively combine modules of learning into pathways that are agile and adaptable to the changing labor market.

The fusion of modularization with mastery-based learning is the key to understanding how these providers can build a multitude of stackable credentials or programs for a wide variety of industries, scale them, and simultaneously drive down the cost of educating students for the opportunities at hand. These programs target a growing set of students who are looking for a different value proposition from higher education—one that centers on targeted and specific learning outcomes, tailored support, as well as identifiable skillsets that are portable and meaningful to employers.