Questioning Lectures The old-school lecture is taking a thumping. In a world where more and more of our experiences are web-based and disconnected from location and time, the idea that we would find it logical to get students to get together in a single location at a specific time to hear a presentation seems increasingly odd. "Imagine", Donald Clark writes, "if a movie were shown only once. Or your local newspaper was read out just once a day in the local square. Or novelists read their books out once to an invited audience. That’s face-to-face lectures for you: it’s that stupid." Others focus more on the instructional value of lectures — regardless of the role of technology. Graham Gibbs: "More than 700 studies have confirmed that lectures are less effective than a wide range of methods for achieving almost every educational goal you can think of. Even for the straightforward objective of transmitting factual information, they are no better than a host of alternatives, including private reading. Moreover, lectures inspire students less than other methods, and lead to less study afterwards." So why do we hang on to lectures? Explanations of the persistence of lectures point to the usual suspects: the challenge of introducing new instructional strategies, the dictates of the physical space, class size, the difficulty (and possibly anxiety) about using more interactive instructional experiences, and more. Privileging the Original and One-of-a-Kind One factor that we may not have considered is how lectures fit into a broader cultural framework that privileges original and live events (or one-of-a-kind objects) over reproductions and technologically-mediated experiences. A line was drawn during Modernity between cultural practices and artefacts — such as paintings — that are original and one-of-a-kind — and reproductions of the original, made possible by technology. The original is highly valued; the reproduction, far less so. This basic distinction unfolds in different arenas in roughly the same fashion: One-of-a-kind artisan crafts v mass manufactured "crafts" Live music performances v recordings Paintings v photographic reproductions Haute couture fashion v "pret a porter" (or ready-to-wear) The increased capacity to make reproductions, according to theorists like Walter Benjamin of The Frankfurt School, served to reconfigure the meaning and value of both the original and the copy. The presence of ubiquitous copies can weaken the value of the original, but it still maintains a privileged status. The original has an "aura". (See "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", 1936.) The shift from lectures to digital higher education is not merely a migration from one instructional model to another, but a shift from a one-time, "original", live event or object to a recorded and reproducible event or object. As with art and other cultural artefacts and practices, the original is privileged. Visitors to The Louvre take photographs of The Mona Lisa, an image they only know through photographs. The distinctions often reveal themselves through language; the choice of words and the metaphors we use. Defenders of the lecture, like Mark Edmundson tell us that "Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. There is the basic melody that you work with. It is defined by the syllabus. But there is also a considerable measure of improvisation against that disciplining background." The lecture, Abigail Walthausen explains, "is an art, and like other arts such as painting, musicianship and writing, it takes real dedication and many hours of practice to excel at." Clay Shirky rightly notes that defenders of lectures believe that face-to-face education is the only "real" education — everything else is a facsimile, at best. (Shirky proposed The MOOC Criticism Drinking Game: take a swig whenever someone says "real", "true", or "genuine" when questioning the value of MOOCs.) Given that we tend to privilege live/original experiences, it is understandable that academics would celebrate the live educational format — and want to protect their place within it. There are few professions that involve strapping on a microphone and speaking to large groups of people — sometimes hundreds at a time — on a daily basis. Fewer occupations, still, call for the professional to offer their own unique perspective on a topic. (The sacred but often questioned link between teaching and research is key here.) I wouldn’t be the first to identify the link between the identity of the academic and the archetype of the lone artist — an individual working doggedly on a personal project before presenting it to the world. Dr. Keith Hampson is Managing Director, Client Innovation at Acrobatiq, a Carnegie Mellon University venture born out of CMU’s long history in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. @Acrobatiq

Working with it’s ad agency Leo Burnett, Heinz Ketchup changed the criteria of what constitutes good ketchup and, as a result, increased its market share. They defined the products’ relatively thick quality as the new ideal. The difficulty of getting the ketchup out of the bottle became a marker of quality. The criteria we use to evaluate different aspects of our world can have an immense impact. Different criteria encourage different behaviours and outcomes, whether we’re talking about something as banal as ketchup or more substantial matters such as how we evaluate political leaders (e.g. great at speeches, but no experience) or what constitutes great higher education. In most sectors, evaluations strike a balance between the issues of cost and quality. Both concepts can be interpreted in a number of ways, of course: cost can include the price paid, but also the "cost" of accessing the product or service. Quality can focus on the experience of using the product/service, but also the ways in which ownership of the product/service will position the user in social circles. Higher education is unique in this regard. The tendency in this sector is to focus almost exclusively on issues pertaining to quality and to downplay the relevance of cost. This is unfortunate. The primary focus on quality sounds ideal, but it serves to dramatically limit the range of options that higher education offers students. Seeking out innovations that offer new combinations of cost and quality will increase the diversity of solutions available. The objective should be to maximize value; to find new ways to improve the balance between quality and cost.  A wider range of options are needed at various price points. "Free, as in cost-free" Neglect of price is evident in criticism of MOOCs. This comment followed The Economist recent articles on online higher education (See "Creative Destruction" and "The Digital Degree"): "I’m a prof at a mid-sized Canadian university. Plenty of my students have told me that they’ve looked at the MOOC recorded lectures from MIT and Harvard, and they weren’t any better than what we offered." A direct comparison of traditional online higher education and MOOCs based solely on quality is insufficient for determining the significance of this new format and business model — because, as everyone knows, MOOCs are free (or close to free).  The dramatically greater scale (number of end-users) of the MOOC model provides economies which in turn allow for higher quality relative to cost (i.e. value). Consequently, it should be of no solace to our Canadian academic that his courses are as good. The fact that this isn’t obvious reflects the tendency to downplay the relevance of cost. It’s also naive. "She got into a good school . . . " The tendency to only think in terms of quality is also evident in the way in which we compare institutions. Students are told that Yale, Vassar and other selective institutions are "great institutions" that are better than state universities, which  in turn are better than community colleges, and so on. The fact that tuition levels between different institutions can vary by as much as 1500% is downplayed. While everyone understands the importance of relative price on an intellectual level, we continue to reinforce this odd evaluation scheme year after year. In any other sector of the economy, this logic would seem bizarre. This accepted logic and criteria helps to reinforce the tendency of institutions to move in unison toward a singular notion of excellence. Clayton Christensen, and others, have defined this as the Harvard DNA - the guiding North Star of higher education — that encourages universities to gravitate toward the selective research university model. We see this same logic in play when colleges seek to transform themselves into universities, and when mid-tier schools like George Washington University and NYU use dramatic increases in tuition fees to signal "excellence". (See Daniel Luzer’s excellent article, The Prestige Racket.) The narrow definition of value can also suppress innovations in higher education that offer excellent value at far lower prices. Straighterline pioneered a business model that allows students to pay low monthly fees for ACE-accredited courses as they begin their college and university careers. While the company has managed to succeed, their approach challenges orthodoxy in higher education that equates low-prices with bad education. But at these monthly tuition levels, the value is greater than what students would receive from most other education providers. A broader and more fluid evaluation scheme in higher education that considers value — not merely quality — will open the door to new instructional strategies, business models, and types of programs. :: :: Dr. Keith Hampson is Managing Director, Client Innovation at Acrobatiq, a Carnegie Mellon University venture born out of CMU’s long history in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. @Acrobatiq  

"Economies of scale are factors that cause the average cost of producing something to fall as the volume of its output increases." One of the common and more provocative scenarios for MOOCs involves using these courses at multiple institutions. In other words, build once (e.g. by Harvard), use often (multiple institutions). The benefit of this approach, at least potentially, is that by sharing content across multiple institutions we drive down the cost of offering online courses and, second, the relatively high volume of users makes it possible to increase the level of investment in each course. San Jose State University’s attempt to integrate the Udacity course serves as a high profile example. This isn’t a new idea. People have been considering how scale might fit into higher education since the 1990s. It wasn’t until MOOCs that we had a concrete and well-known example to serve as focal point for this discussion. Higher education has not put a great deal of effort into finding ways to reduce costs through scale. While other sectors seized the new economics of digital content storage and distribution, higher education has continued to produce and use digital instructional content locally; a digital cottage industry model, of sorts. For elite institutions or those aspiring to be elite, scale runs counter to one of the trappings of elite status: exclusivity. For others, the highly decentralized organization of the institutions makes institution-wide scale improbable. Another factor is concern amongst decision-makers about the impact of sharing courses on labour market value and autonomy. "Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education." San Jose State University faculty responding to the call to use Michael Sandel’s MOOC as part of their program. Just How Common Is It? Scale is directly tied to the degree to which curriculum is common or shared across institutions.  This component of scale hasn’t, to my knowledge, been sufficiently addressed. If a course is to "scale" there must significant commonalities across institutions of higher education of what they teach and how. It is implied in the Coursera/Udacity/edX business model — but surely never stated outright — that undergraduate curriculum in the US (and beyond) is sufficiently common. Commonality is the premise of the textbook industry, of course. Certain courses, particularly in the first and second year of programs,  can be satisfied by a single textbook across hundreds of institutions. US textbooks are used in other nations, in fact — only modified lightly to refer to local conditions. A highly provocative study by (what was then called) Coopers and Lybrand suggested that 25 individual courses constituted 80% of registrations. The concept of The Long Tail might provide a structured approach to understanding the degree to which courses are common and how this might impact costs. Chris Anderson’s "The Long Tail" (2004) contends that the Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of producing and distributing digital products. "Shelf space" on the Internet is virtually infinite and increasingly inexpensive. It’s now financially feasible for vendors to sell a much wider variety of digital products, particularly books, films, and music and other media. Marketing strategy is shifting from a dependence on a relatively limited number of "hits" or "blockbusters"  (e.g. Top 40 radio; New York Times bestseller lists) to serving niches. Anderson argues that consumers have historically purchased "hits" — not because they are indifferent to less popular fare, but because of a lack of choice. But the Internet is now removing the bottleneck between suppliers and consumers. And as search and distribution technologies improve, and costs continue to decrease, Anderson forecasts that the top sellers in a variety of markets will constitute a smaller share of total sales, and the number of different products available will increase dramatically (i.e. further flattening and lengthening of the distribution of sales). While the top-rated television shows often captured more than 50% of the audience in the 1960s, today they represent  only10% to 15% and declining. New business models like Netflix have only amplified the shift. The Endurance of "Hits" and Digital Content in Higher Education Several studies have suggested that Anderson’s original work overstated the degree to which people migrated away from a select number of "hits". Anita Elberse’s analysis, Should You Invest in the Long Tail?  (Harvard Business Review), suggests that the market for "blockbusters" remains largely safe from the onslaught of multiplying niche markets. Despite the changing economics of content authoring and distribution that Anderson describes, the bulk of sales are still found in the "head" and the "tail" is remarkably flat.  Greater variety is not always matched by demand. The degree to which Elberse’s argument invalidates the Long Tail theory is somewhat dependent on where we draw the line between the "head" and the "tail"; that is to say, what we think constitutes a "hit". What’s most useful about her work is that it reminds us that there are important forces at play in each sector that give shape to the distribution of sales (head and tail). The insights from Anderson, and the questions posed about these insights by Elberse, can help us understand and anticipate the factors that might the demand for a more diverse range of content in higher education? Do we have a preference or need for "hits" in higher education? As a starting point for addressing these questions, I offer three issues that may effect the length of the "tail" of content in digital higher ed: Quality (Re)assurance. Do we need assurances from others in the field about the quality of content, and from whom, exactly? There are conventions in place: In traditional textbook publishing, it is conventional to employ currently employed academics from well-known (preferably) institutions of higher education as authors. In OER, we find the use of simple rating systems, such as stars (one-to-five), to crowd-source evaluations. To what degree will the need for assurance from others limit the expansion of the "tail"? Consistent and Coherent Curriculum. To what extent must the content be consistent with the curriculum within the institution and other institutions? Although not to the same degree as K12, higher education is a "system" in which students progress, step-by-step. There are levels into which content must fit. When a student moves from first year to second year, or transfers from one school to another, there is an assumption (hope?) that the first year accounting course at University A is roughly equivalent to the same course at University B.  The Bologna Process is relevant here. Production Quality. How important is it to educators and students that the content that they use meet a minimum standard of production quality? That is to say, at what point does "home-made" content become a liability because it is either difficult to integrate into an LMS, "buggy" (in the case of content embedded in applications), or simply difficult to use for students and instructors? How far along the "tail" will content of sufficient quality be found? As the variety of content increases in the coming years, educators, institutions and publishers may want to pay attention to these and other issues to determine how they go about creating, acquiring and distributing content. Although it’s too early to be certain, my suspicion is that like the markets of music, film, and books, the demand for "hits" in digital edu content will remain surprisingly strong. :: :: Note: A number of people have written about the relationship between The Long Tail and education. You’ll recognize, though, that some of them use the concept of the Long Tail to analyze the diversification of students. That is, the tail gets longer as more people participate in higher education.  Instead, I use the concept to analyze the diversity of educational content. Although the former approach may be of great value, my focus on educational content is more in line with Anderson’s original use of the concept.   Note 2: The concept of "mass customization" overlaps with The Long Tail in important ways. For more on more customization, see "How Technology Can Drive the Next Wave of Mass Customization" (McKinsey) Dr. Keith Hampson is Managing Director, Client Innovation at Acrobatiq, a Carnegie Mellon University venture born out of CMU’s long history in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. @keithhampson & @Acrobatiq  

:: :: "Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new, not-so-new articles and downright old ideas, events and other items for higher education professionals. 1 A solid introduction to the concept of bundling/unbundling as it relates to higher education. Unbundling And Re-bundling In Higher Education "As a technology matures, however, it eventually overshoots the raw performance that many customers need. As a result, new disruptive innovations emerge that are more modular—or unbundled—as customers become less willing to pay for things like power and increased reliability but instead prioritize the ability to customize affordably by mixing and matching different pieces that fit together according to precise standards." 2 I love a good analogy. How College is Like Sunscreen "College students are paying more. They are taking on more debt. They are accepting worse jobs after they graduate and earning less than they did just five years ago. So how could it possibly be true that college is more important than ever? The answer is sunscreen." 3 This next piece was written in 1995. Interesting predictions about the future of online higher education. Electronics and the Dim Future of the University "Thus, while new communications technologies are likely to strengthen research, they will also weaken the traditional major institutions of learning, the universities. Instead of prospering with the new tools, many of the traditional functions of universities will be superseded, their financial base eroded, their technology replaced and their role in intellectual inquiry reduced. This is not a cheerful scenario for higher education." 4 In particular, take a look at idea five, "Software Will Eat the World". The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen "Andreessen believes that enormous technology companies can now be built around the use of hyperintelligent software to revolutionize whole sectors of the economy, from retail to real estate to health care."  

What makes Acrobatiq courses unique in the marketplace?  Some say it’s the evidence-based approach to learning and course design, based on ten years of research from CMU’s Open Learning Initiative, others say it’s The Learning DashboardTM.  We know that it’s both, and the fact that we never stop iterating. This summer we are releasing newly developed features in a private beta period with select customers.  These new features are being rolled out on a course-by-course basis this summer for use in the fall of 2014. With our latest update, we have released two new major pieces of functionality that represent a giant leap forward in enabling faculty to gain insights into the work their students are doing and more importantly, how that work impacts learning.   Learning Dashboard™ Using a customizable, question-based interface,  instructors can quickly gain insight into student learning.  Previously, an instructor only had access to learning information broken up in one predefined way.  However, we know that learning is only one piece of the puzzle.  When that information is related to work, instructors can much more easily identify students who are at risk and tailor the intervention based on how much work they are (or are not) completing in the course.  As users create tailored views (such as identifying a group of students to track, or based on schedule) they can save their favorite views.  For example, the image below is a snapshot of students’ learning states since the start of the course.  Now, our engagement and learning data allow the user to understand the relationship between a students’ work and their learning progress, which they can tailor to the method of instruction they are using (standard class, flipped classroom, competency-based mentoring, etc.). View Student Work For the first time, instructors can see all of the formative practice work their students have done (as well as quiz and homework) just as the student sees it.  This includes any recommendations or achievements students accomplish as they work.  Besides providing insight at the individual student level, this facilitates communication among teachers and students who connect remotely. Instructors will finally have the ability to specifically target their online students who are at-risk and deliver tactical intervention.

Nick Di Nardo, host of "Meet Education" interviews Dr. Keith Hampson of Acrobatiq.  

"Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new, not-so-new articles and downright old ideas, events and other items for higher education professionals.  1 Measuring Innovation in Education By OECD "The ability to measure innovation is essential to an improvement strategy in education. Knowing whether, and how much, practices are changing within classrooms and educational organisations, how teachers develop and use their pedagogical resources, and to what extent change can be linked to improvements would provide a substantial increase in the international education knowledge base. Measuring Innovation in Education offers new perspectives to address this need for measurement in educational innovation through a comparison of innovation in education to innovation in other sectors, identification of specific innovations across educational systems, and construction of metrics to examine the relationship between educational innovation and changes in educational outcomes." 2 Thoughts on Innovation in Higher Education: Sorting the Revolutionary Change from the Merely Cosmetic By Peter Bryant "What became clear to me after presenting these opinions in a number of places is that there is an accepted and arguably melodramatic narrative that MOOCs will change the world, the education has already passed a tipping point, weak brands will die and strong brands will survive, just like the music industry. Anyone who argues against this is misinformed, ignorant or an idealist pining for the days gone by. And it is easy to portray those who disagree with you as naysayers, luddites or people who just don’t get it. Now, this is not a universal set of behaviours. I have had some engaging and pragmatic debates with MOOC players, and both our understandings are better for it." 3 Five Ways to Maximize Your Investment in Adaptive Learning By Eduventures "If you’re considering implementing adaptive learning at your institution, here are five things to consider based on Eduventures research and recent interviews from our latest report, Maximizing Investment in Adaptive Learning." 4 Competency vs. Mastery by John Ebersole "On close examination, one might ask if competency-based education (or CBE) programs are really about "competency," or are they concerned with something else? Perhaps what is being measured is more closely akin to subject matter "mastery." The latter can be determined in a relatively straightforward manner, using various forms of examinations, projects and other forms of assessment. However, an understanding of theories, concepts and terms tells us little about an individual’s ability to apply any of these in practice, let alone doing so with the skill and proficiency which would be associated with competence. Deeming someone competent, in a professional sense, is a task that few competency-based education programs address. While doing an excellent job, in many instances, of determining mastery of a body of knowledge, most fall short in the assessment of true competence." 5 Why Do Americans Stink at Math?  By Elizabeth Green "The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them. It wasn’t the first time that Americans had dreamed up a better way to teach math and then failed to implement it. The same pattern played out in the 1960s, when schools gripped by a post-Sputnik inferiority complex unveiled an ambitious "new math," only to find, a few years later, that nothing actually changed. In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices."  

"Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new, not-so-new articles and downright old ideas, events and other items for higher education professionals. We think they’re worth reading. 1 Tottering Ivory Towers  By Stuart Butler "The higher education business should look to earlier episodes of technological tumult to gauge its future Low-cost ventures of so-so quality also pose a potentially devastating threat by undermining cross-subsidies in a traditional business model. Website advertising and Craigslist were deadly to the economics of newspapers because experienced journalists and news bureaus need cross subsidies to survive, just as full-service hospitals do. The reason why getting a few stitches in the ER can cost a small fortune is that ER procedures make possible high-quality care in low-revenue generating areas such as pediatrics. That, in turn, is why the growth of walk-in clinics and other providers offering low prices for low-cost services is such a threat to big hospitals. The breakup of such cross-subsidized services is often referred to as "unbundling", and it is a worrying phenomenon for "full-service" providers in any industry. This is precisely what we are seeing in higher education." 2 The feds tried to rate colleges in 1911. It was a disaster By Libby Nelson "Somewhere in the US Education Department, statistical experts and policymakers are at work on a highly controversial idea: a federal system to rate colleges based on their quality, much as Consumer Reports rates refrigerators. Many colleges hate this idea, and it turns out the uproar is nothing new. The forerunner of the modern Education Department tried a similar idea in 1911. At the time, colleges opposed the federal quality ratings so bitterly that two American presidents eventually intervened to halt their publication." 3 The Future of College? "A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by stripping it down to its essence, eliminating lectures and tenure along with football games, ivy-covered buildings, and research libraries. What if he’s right? The paradox of undergraduate education in the United States is that it is the envy of the world, but also tremendously beleaguered. In that way it resembles the U.S. health-care sector. Both carry price tags that shock the conscience of citizens of other developed countries. They’re both tied up inextricably with government, through student loans and federal research funding or through Medicare. But if you can afford the Mayo Clinic, the United States is the best place in the world to get sick. And if you get a scholarship to Stanford, you should take it, and turn down offers from even the best universities in Europe, Australia, or Japan. (Most likely, though, you won’t get that scholarship. The average U.S. college graduate in 2014 carried $33,000 of debt.)" 4 A return to the elephant of college pricing  By Dr. Lloyd Armstrong "Looking at the elephant of higher education pricing from a bit of a distance, we see that the strategy of raising published prices very rapidly and trying to mitigate resulting problems by providing aid - high tuition, high aid-  doesn’t work particularly well in the eyes of any constituency, and for some it appears to be a near catastrophe. NOBODY LIKES THE ELEPHANT! It may be time to begin to look at alternative pricing strategies."

"Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new, not-so-new articles and downright old ideas, events and other items for higher education professionals. We think they’re worth reading. 1 Got Skills? Retooling Vocational Education (The Economist) Excerpt: "The university bubble is also beginning to burst. Democratising universities has proved an expensive and inefficient way of providing mass higher education. Americans, who led the way, have taken on more than $1 trillion in student debt. But a growing number think that they got poor value for money—taught by PhD students not professors, forced to subsidise expensive research programmes and administrative cadres, and provided, at the end of it all, with a college diploma that no longer automatically brings a desirable job." "Frustration with the status quo is at last leading to a burst of innovation. The internet is well suited to vocational education: it helps reduce costs while making it easier to earn a living while doing some vocational training. Just as important is the birth of a new concept of what is being delivered." 2 Are Universities Going the Way of Record Labels? The Internet’s power to unbundle content and increase personal choice transformed the music industry—and it’s doing the same thing to higher education. Excerpt: "Students are the big winners here. Decreased cost of content combined with increased competition among professors, and lower average ROI for universities per professor, will lead to lower tuition costs and greater choice.Great professors with interdisciplinary knowledge—the great curators—will see license and royalty fees go up as they command economies of scale in distribution. Existing institutions with large endowments will become the record labels: platforms that invest in great talent. And distribution platforms that curate content will do well, commanding both economies of scale and scope." 3 Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution Excerpt: "This book illuminates the great disruptive potential of online competency- based education. Workforce training, competency-based learning, and online learning are clearly not new phenomena, but online competency-based education is revolutionary because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers, and the right business model. In contrast to other recent trends in higher education, particularly the tremendous fanfare around massive open online courses (MOOCs), 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."

(Note: Part One in this series on the subject of online consortia can be found here.) :: In the late 90s — during the "early years" of online higher education — many colleges and universities didn’t have the internal resources required to build, support and market online education. Some institutions saw fit to join online consortia; by pooling limited resources, each institution gained access to the resources they needed. Many of these early initiatives are still operating.  Access and/or Innovation In a recent review we conducted of online higher ed consortia, we found that the majority of consortia, and the vast majority of those that started ten or more years ago, are designed primarily to increase access. That is, these initiatives define success by the number of online courses created and/or supported by the consortia, and the number of students enrolled in these courses. More courses, means more access. Access is obviously important. However, for a number of reasons, we believe that a recasting of the consortia model for online higher education would be beneficial. Given the state of online education, the focus needs now to shift from ensuring institutions can launch and support online courses, to stimulating innovation and improving quality. Time to Focus on Innovation First, and most obviously, the needs of member institutions have changed and consequently consortia need to change, as well. Over the last decade-and-a-half, most colleges and universities have significantly augmented their internal capacity to develop, support and market online education. The LMS is now near universal. The majority of university leaders see online education as fundamental to institutional strategy, and far more instructors have experience teaching online. moving beyond the basics . . . As internal capacity of member institutions increase, the functions that can’t be done well (or at all) within each member institution change too. Although this may seem so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, our review suggests otherwise. Many consortia we reviewed continue to provide only the basic requirements of creating and supporting online courses. One consortium, for example, simply assigned a single instructional designer to work with a lone instructor from the member institution to develop an online course. No meaningful quality standards are employed, the instructor isn’t even paid for the course development. Fewer and fewer institutions need these basic services. It isn’t surprising that our review found that institutions that have set more ambitious goals for online education are less interested in participating in consortia. Our review suggested that more consortia should focus less on providing basic, increasingly common, services and more on helping institutions test and scale more ambitious online learning strategies that can improve outcomes and drive down costs. If the fundamental value proposition of consortia is that it enables member institutions to do what they can’t done alone, then the initiative should be deliberately and systematically focusing on those functions that are anything but "basic". Services that fall into the category of "ambitious" in 2014 might include the development of rich media, the use of learning analytics, and the development of competency-based programs. why consortia . . . Consortia align particularly well with three trends in online higher education: A slow, but important migration to the software model of course development, in which upfront costs for course development are relatively high, but maintenance and distribution costs are marginal. By pooling resources, consortia can accommodate higher upfront costs and then coordinate distribution at scale. Growing use of analytics to inform and personalize learning. The more data is shared and compared across institutions, the greater its value. Again, consortia are well positioned to facilitate the proper movement of data-generated insights across institutions. Online education will continue to demand new, increasingly complex skills and knowledge that are not readily available within each institution. Consortia can serve as a central, shared source of talent and technology across individual institutions. defining ROI . . . Consortia need to define and then share clearer and more concrete objectives with member institutions. In particular, it would be useful for consortia to provide members with more robust assessments of the initiative’s ROI. If success is defined by the consortium (as noted above) by the number of online courses and students that are supported by the consortia, then members should be able to assess whether the cost of running the consortia is greater than the actual increase in enrolment and number of courses. ROI is always difficult in education, but consortia — given their frequently tenuous financial stability — may be less inclined to produce this kind of information. Member institutions should demand it. built to change . . . Lastly, consortia must be built to change. If, as suggested, the basic purpose and value proposition of the consortia is to do what member institutions can’t do separately, then the services offered must change as technology, costs, and objectives change. Again, this may seem obvious. But consortia struggle with change like other organizations. Nevertheless, the value proposition of consortia requires that they continually adjust their services to meet changing conditions. :: Dr. Keith Hampson is Managing Director, Client Innovation at Acrobatiq, a Carnegie Mellon University venture born out of CMU’s long history in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. @Acrobatiq Consortia typically offer a range of services for member institutions: Course registration and course registration systems Help desk (technology and/or administrative) for students Professional development for instructors Learning management systems Video conferencing (hardware, software and support) Webinar hosting and management (hardware, software and support) Sharing of online courses between institutions Instructional quality assessment and rubrics Development of new applications Multimedia development (instructional material) Market research services Instructor training on educational technology Instructional design Tutoring services (student online/phone) Learning object repositories Project management/coordination Marketing / clearinghouse of members courses and programs