Group items tagged

The business model begins to take shape.

Clay lays into the current higher ed model

All industries have to cope with the disruption of the unfolding digital revolution, and education is no exception. This multi-faceted disruption can be seen in the new wave of MOOCs. The arrival of 'massive open online courses' appears to be another tectonic shift in the evolution of higher education and HE internationalisation. MOOCs are free of charge, designed for large numbers of people to take them at once, encourage peer-to-peer learning, and award certificates rather than academic course credit. This article, the first of a short series on disruptive innovation in HE, describes three new start-ups - Coursera, edX and Udacity - and explores the challenges they pose to traditional models of delivery in higher education.

The business model is developing.

"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age. Higher education underwent this kind of evolution in the past as the United States shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The classical agrarian college, imported from 17th-century England with a curriculum rooted in the Middle Ages, was established to educate a learned clergy to govern the colonies. This model held sway until the early 19th century."

"Making the Case"

D'Arcy makes an interesting observation about what is driving the MOOC craze.

Possibly some ideas for how Wooster might begin to think about tweaking our curriculum.

Khan's ideas for what a 21st century university could look like sounds a lot like how I have heard early centers of learning described.