<p>I don’t know if this has been posted yet, but it’s an excellent discussion about the pressures all universities will face from technology and why colleges should not be, and the most intelligent schools are not, comforted by the lower quality of the current online education offerings.</p>
<p><a href=“Tottering Ivory Towers - The American Interest”>http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/08/11/tottering-ivory-towers/</a></p>
<p>The conclusion is interesting and likely very right:</p>
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<p>I believe that this article describes the future of higher ed in America.</p>
<p>The great research universities that can exist solely by doing research will still go on, but
tons of LACs & other small privates will disappear.</p>
<p>It will be better in some ways and worse in others, but the “college experience” will likely be very different.</p>
<p>20 years from now, people who grossly overpaid for their bricks & mortar college experience and are still paying off their massive student loans, will feel like incredible chumps.</p>
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<p>A lot of them already do.</p>
<p>“All universities” = “the ivies”?</p>
<p>At least the writer notes that nearly all colleges share a faulty model instead of dumping the allegation on only the “elite schools.” :)>- </p>
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<p>A facetious take on the “Ivory Towers.”</p>
<p>To take it a step further companies will increase their use of consultants and virtual employees. If the job can be done on line it will be given to the best bid in the world. Companies will be more interested in your ability to do a specific job and will look at ability and past work rather than diplomas. Even certification will lose some of its charm as long as consultants get the job done. Companies can build a test for each job needed and you will test on line for accuracy and speed.</p>
<p>In 2011 my son went through a series of online tests from a company before being offered a job. </p>
<p>It’s a new world. Changes are coming fast and furious. </p>
<p>With pensions disappearing, retirement accounts being self funded and health insurance no longer tied to employment there is no reason for a person to work for one company. There is no reason for companies to fund these perks. There is no more need to be loyal.</p>
<p>My kids are well aware they need to constantly keep on top of new skills in order to remain relevant in today’s working world. Many of these skills are gained by being self taught through online sources.</p>
<p>4 yr degrees will become outdated in just a few years.</p>
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<p>This is a really interesting perspective @sax Do you mean that a students four year degree will itself be outdated in four years, or the four year degree model itself will be outdated not long from now? </p>
<p>The first seems like it could already be happening, and the second seems like a real possibility, long term.</p>
<p>people taking basket weaving will be a much smaller group of students.(rich kids) those who will need other peoples money to attend college will be expected and understand that a viable degree will be required off them. </p>
<p>I don’t know, though. I think the idea may be to bring the price down to a reasonable level so that people don’t have to take all that much of other people’s money. I think, though, it’s more about losing control of the educational model the way the music industry and print media has.</p>
<p>This article doesn’t mention what is happening in high schools, where “sage on stage” models are becoming obsolete or at least less frequent, with interactive smartboards, flipped classrooms (learn at home online, teacher facilitates “homework” in class), and the use of tablets or laptops or other devices by every student. These changes are starting to trickle into colleges, even the elites.</p>
<p>I think MOOC’s are a bad example of online innovation in education. I have taken some excellent online courses at our state university, with discussions far better than anything in on campus classes, and fascinating use of media and other online resources. I lasted one day on a MOOC poetry class with tens of thousands of participants, and slow paced instruction (Ivy professor), perhaps slow because of the lack of immediate feedback from students.</p>
<p>What is interesting about MOOC’s however, is that people sign up for them often out of interest. Some are vocational, for sure, but what does it say about the intellectual hunger of our society when so many sign up for a poetry course? And was this hunger originally whetted by humanities classes in traditional college?</p>
<p>What I find most interesting in this article is the author’s apparent confusion about the purpose of higher education. What I see is the increasing, now dominating, idea that college is, nor needs to be, career oriented. The author here starts out by saying college grads aren’t getting jobs in their field of study, related to their major. That is a relatively new expectation. The old idea, though elitist, was to study broadly, and focus in on one area with depth, to be an educated person. Furthermore, the idea was that once that was done, you could do almost any job, with the writing and reading skills gained, but also the broader ability to take on new information, research, process and apply. It was training for the mind (and I suppose, heart).</p>
<p>With increased access to college (versus elitism of old), comes a big change in culture. Financial aid has added to this by enabling people of all classes to attend some sort of college. Often with debt, which increases practical focus on return on investment. The author barely touches on this. And as college has become a prerequisite for many jobs, even when that requirement is downright silly, the majority of college students is now “non-traditional,” older, often working and raising families. So of course there is a new market, and online courses help with that. Which came first, cart or horse?</p>
<p>The more vocational college expectations become, the more absurd all that debt seems. If money and career are the sole focus, why learn about Shakespeare or take biology? Community college vocational degrees and certificates become very attractive. We should have more on the job training, apprenticeships and so on. The truth is, many are in college to earn not learn and there may be better ways to accomplish that, even with manufacturing pretty much defunct or outsourced. </p>
<p>Then, ideally, college campuses would be mainly for those with academic interests and the atmosphere in classes might be a little more inspiring. Again, it is interesting that people are signing on to non-credit MOOC’s in droves: it seems there are people out there who want to do work just to learn about something.</p>
<p>At present, there are many kids sitting in the back row of intro to sociology or freshman comp who don’t want to be there but want to be able to support themselves and family. If the orthodoxy that college is an absolute economic necessity would just die a quick death, we would all be better off. But it won’t happen, and that is the big question: where is this orthodoxy coming from?</p>
<p>I have serious doubts about the thesis of this article: I think there will be more and more class stratification in education and a degree will become less and less valuable, but the lack of a degree will become more and more of a liability, Think about it. That is one heck of a trap for all of us and our kids. </p>
<p>On campus elite institutions will adopt some new sexy technological innovations but will remain much the same. Harvard tries to be democratic (paternal ) but the Extension School offers a different degree entirely and I doubt Harvard will ever, ever grant credit for online MOOC’s, at least not Harvard undergrad credit. You cannot even transfer credit to Harvard if you take a class elsewhere, for the most part. It is a well-protected brand and rightly so I might add.</p>
<p>I think the expansion of opportunity to get an education, and introduction of new technologies is a wonderful thing but the pressure on absolutely everyone to get a bachelor’s (and more) is burdensome and increases social and economic divisions. As time goes on more and more people will kill themselves to get a degree that will become meaningless to employers, while elite colleges continue to thrive. I sincerely hope things change.</p>
<p>p.s. In the late 60’s we thought “the establishment” was all over. I didn’t even want to go to college in that atmosphere (young men had to go or be drafted). I have spent a lifetime working and raising kids and taking one class at a time, yes, at different institutions. A good online class is my favorite experience in education. I never knew I was a visionary! </p>
<p>I don’t buy it. Sorry. </p>
<p>Search for these phrases: “Take my online class.” and “Write my term paper.” When I search for those terms, I find commercial operations offering to take onerous academic tasks out of my hands. With time, these functions could perhaps be automated, so we’ll find computers taking classes taught by computers. (As, apparently, some scientific papers published in journals were written by computers.)</p>
<p>Just as writing exercises for classes are becoming classroom-based exercises (as who can tell if the student wrote the paper, or if it was a cut-and-paste job), we’ll find a greater need for in-person class attendance. The college diploma from a bricks-and-mortar college will testify to class attendance. The diploma from an online university will testify to possession of a computer, internet access, and a checkbook.</p>
<p>MOOCs will only succeed if employers find their graduates can write, speak, and think. Time will tell, but I’m not convinced. Far more likely is a division of offerings into real education for the wealthy and those with the potential to be auto-didacts, and automated “check-the-box education” for everyone else. </p>
<p>I don’t know. I see it as the same thing we have happening all over the place. We have this heavy duty concentration of power at the top and this kind of underground chipping away going on beneath the surface. So, we have this kind of slow/fast destabilization which takes place in these kinds of monolithic industries. And, make no mistake, at this point “education” is an industry like any other. I like the way the author compares the music and the print industries, as well as those of the past.</p>
<p>I think the technological revolution is actually just beginning, in terms of societal remodeling. We see the effects in many areas, including the new phenomena of graduates moving to less populated cities and out of those centers which were once created by the industrial revolution. But, really, its interesting the way the experts at even HBS and MIT see it. </p>
<p>I can’t pretend to fully grasp the implications, for education, and everything else, but I think it’s clear to all of us that our kids are not entering the same world we did as adults. </p>
<p>Not buying it. If anything there will be greater value placed on the custom handmade education over the education of the masses. The gap will just grow. </p>
<p>Periwinkle. No one cares if you went to class. </p>
<p>Right now, my sons company is funding his on line MS from Georgia tech.it will be the same diploma that kids in class receive. He watches the class. Does the homework, communicates with the prof via email and takes tests at a proctoring site. He can be out of town or out of the country and still go to class and do homework.</p>
<p>Kids worldwide can watch classes at MIT through their open courses. They can learn everything in a compressed time in their bedrooms if they wanted to.</p>
<p>Look at the way businesses are being run now. On line conference calls with people all over the world. You do not have to be in the same room. Different countries offering different pieces of the pie you are putting together with whatever widgets you need. How about 3 D printing…where’s that taking us?</p>
<p>Our little kids are playing on line games with kids in numerous countries at once and talking with them on headsets. They are doing projects where all their work is held in the cloud for others to add to.</p>
<p>Why would these worldly kids want to be held down to a classroom with 20 kids in it?</p>
<p>Technology continues to blow us all away. What they learn in college may be quickly outdated. Hey, I’m closing in on 60 and I still need to keep learning new things. I’m still working on knowing everything in Excel. I can learn it on line and keep up with the latest stuff.</p>
<p>Our kids will all be part of small consulting groups that can offer specific skills for a company that only needs them for a certain amount of time. </p>
<p>It would be fun to put together a group of basic skills workers will need in the future. It is so exciting.</p>
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<p>Clearly coursera and online courses will have an effect on undergraduate education (has already started) and may even lower prices, but I don’t think that changes the general concept of the value (to the student and to the industry of) going through a <strong>rigorous</strong> certified program (although these may get more specialized and more rigorous). Think of a more difficult ABET <a href=“Accreditation - ABET”>http://www.abet.org/accreditation/</a> for engineers and similarly more specialized for Nurses, MedTechs etc.</p>
<p>Note that the fastest growing segment of jobs recently has been those requiring graduate (!) degrees - the need for objective rigorous acquisition of skills (ideally provided in partnerships with Universities) has not lessened but online courses will help raise the bar (at least for some introductory courses) and already have.</p>
<p>Yes those things made in 20 different sites come together so well. <a href=“What Went Wrong At Boeing?”>http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/01/21/what-went-wrong-at-boeing/</a></p>
<p>Not so sure about this. There have also been article and news stories about the lack of technology to change much in high schools. And that the drop-out rate for online classes is much higher than regular classes. I think online will be valuable in data or information driven masters degrees, and may supplement some courses, but I think there is and will remain a real benefit from students learning together and asking questions in a group setting. </p>
<p>Companies are starting to bring some outsourced work back to the States, finding that the savings were not all there were cracked up to be and inconsistencies in the quality of work and communication issues.</p>
<p>I heard today that even with all the internet shopping available, 90% of all sales are still made in person. People still want to interact with others. </p>
<p>Maybe I am naive, but technology should be a tool, not become the teacher. </p>
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<p>@mom2and
Great example reinforcing your point: online high school classes for gifted students (for example those who have finished BC Calculus or all of the science APs their school offers) with Skype or Google Hangouts (for example) as the “tool.” They are very personal, and in my son’s experience were very rigorous and tailored for 17 year olds not college students. So many posters have commented about how their high school can’t offer some AP Science or some advanced math class - in my son’s
case he was so fortunate to be able to take advantage of “technology as a tool” and able to take a rigorous class
using Skype as a tool but with a real teacher. For the gifted students at smaller high schools this (technology)
has already changed the world for the better.</p>
<p>Barrons, Yes. Boeing is a great example of how to do it wrong. There were quite a few mistakes made by Boeing in putting together a worldwide team. For the most part it was about greed and not making the best components by the best companies. It was and continues to be about managers and marketing making engineering decisions without asking the engineers.</p>
<p>However, Boeing cannot possibly be an expert in all the components that it needs to build anything. They should be bringing together the best outside manufacturers. Not the cheapest. </p>
<p>and hey, Boeing, if you’re interested you need to ask the engineers the best way to do something not have MBA marketing people tell them what to do based on cost and their desire to make many trips to China or Germany for a boondoggle.</p>
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