We’re beginning to see real change in higher education. Not just incremental, "around the edges" change, but substantive and inspiring. No, I’m not referring the first wave of MOOCs. These early efforts at MOOCs amounted to little more than promotional vehicles for elite universities that don’t need promotion, and innovation from institutions with the least to gain from change in higher education. Rather, I’m thinking here of initiatives like ASU’s Global Freshman Academy, the sincere interest in competency-based education which, if done right, requires a substantial modification to current practices, new kinds of partnerships between education companies and colleges, and Minerva University, which blends location and online in new ways. Each of these represents an example of business model innovation. A business model is simply a way of describing how an organization - whether it is a private enterprise or non-profit, retailer or university - goes about providing something of value to people. It’s how it creates, markets and sustainably funds the goods or services it offers. Higher Education’s Overarching Business Model The concept of business models can be used to help us more clearly see understand how our institution is organized and how it operates. This isn’t always obvious: over time, the design of mature institutions like higher education often appear natural and inevitable - fish are the last to notice the water. The concept of business models can help us identify the ways we differ from other organizations. And most importantly, it can help us imagine new ways of organizing ourselves in order to do better work. Most non-profit colleges and universities of higher education in North America operate under essentially a single business model. The differences are a matter of emphasis, variations on a common theme. For example, some institutions place greater emphasis on full-time faculty research productivity. But most institutions only hire faculty that have demonstrated the capacity to do university-level research. And as Christensen has argued, many institutions - regardless of how selective, or how much they emphasize research - share a common notion of what constitutes a "great university" (i.e. research prodcutivity, brand-name faculty, selective admissions, etc). But as many of the examples above suggest, more substantial forms of innovation operate at the program level, rather than on an institutional level. This is true in higher education, as well as in other sectors. The challenge is to scale-up these efforts once they prove successful. The Business Model Canvas Rethinking how we operate can be aided by tools like the "business model canvas", created by Alex Osterwalder and described in his very popular book, Business Model Generator. The Canvas makes it relatively to understand your organization’s mode of operation, and how you might do it differently. The Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder Here’s a quick application of the Canvas to higher education: Market segments Who does the institution serve? Many universities focus on 18-24 year olds, who have recently graduated from high school. Some universities widen their focus with programs serving adults, who are returning to complete undergraduate degrees. Value proposition What are the reasons students and other turn to your institutions? E.g., Widely-recognized credentials that have value in the labor market; ranking as a top research university. Key activities Which activities are fundamental to your organization? E.g., Research, teaching, evaluating student performance, developing programs in subjects of value to society, and granting degrees. Revenue streams What are the sources of funds that make your institution sustainable and how do you capture these funds? E.g., Government capital grants, tuition, philanthropists and research grants. Channels How does your institution interact with stakeholders? E.g., Through on-campus teaching, conference participation, scholarly journals and media. Key partners What are the other organizations your institution partners with on a regular basis? E.g., Research granting organizations, private companies seeking research partners, and regulatory/accreditation bodies. Cost structure What are your main costs, and how do you go about paying for these costs? E.g., Faculty and instructor salaries, administrative staff, building maintenance and marketing. Key resources What are the key resources that every college and university must possess? E.g., Faculty, buildings and accreditation. Stakeholder relationships How does your organization build and maintain relationships with its key stakeholders? E.g. alumni organizations, university email systems, university social networking (Facebook), learning management systems, and media relations officers. Identify Differences Between Types of Institutions To illustrate how you might use the Canvas, let’s consider some of differences between types of higher education institutions: Elite colleges and universities in the US. Higher admission stanadards impacts "Key Resources", for example. More emphasis is placed on physical campus. The "Cost Structure" will include a higher sticker price (tuition), as well as higher level of discounting, and greater funds from alumni (due to the relative wealth of student population and their future earning potential). Fully online coleleges and universities will have different "Cost Structures" (less need for buildings), different "Channels" (online versus face-to-face, and different means of manitaining "Stakeholder Relationships". For-profit colleges and universities in US. They place less emphasis on research and the social aspects of higher education. This difference will be captured, for example, in "Cost Structure", "Key Resources", "Key Activities", and "Market Segments". What constitutes a wholly different business model is subjective: there are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a different business model rather than simply a difference in emphasis, but I don’t think this weakens the value of the Business Model as a concept for analysis. Online Competency-Based Education as Business Model Innovation Competency-based education is a significant shift; a distinct business model. CBE gives shape and direction to the long overdue need to personalize learning in higher education. It allows students to progress at their own pace, incorporates the practice of prior learning assessment (indirectly through self-paced learning or directly through credential recognition), and offers a logical framework for aligning the demands of the labour market with higher education to the extent deemed appropriate by the institution. CBE works especially well for adults that are returning to school to complete programs of study, and it has the potential to reduce costs for students, institutions, and taxpayers by shortening the time to completion. Designing competency-based learning requires, if done well, considerably more thought and planning than is currently devoted to course design. Ensuring that each component of the course — objectives, assessments, and learning activities — are perfectly aligned is, sadly, not common. Moreover, creating the high volume of assessments (formative) required to measure student mastery of the material is labour-intensive. Rather than offering students 3 to 5 assessments per one-semester course, as is common, competency-based learning requires that we provide each student with hundreds of opportunities to test their understanding of the material. These assessments are required in order to measure a students’ mastery and, in turn, to determine how quickly they can move through the curriculum — a foundational element of the CBE model. This requires different tactics for designing and developing courses. Few institutions are currently set up to build hundreds of formative assessments needed to measure student progress and to ensure that each of these are aligned with the prescribed learning objectives and learning activities. Few have the internal capacity to create learning platforms that measure student performance and provide detailed asssessments based on these measurements. Institutions will turn to vendors and form partnerships with other institutions to build these tools and processes. More will link their programs to other institutions and industry associations to increase the volume and value of the data that needed. Institutions will need to be prepared to move students through at different paces — rather than as a cohorts, semester-by-semester. This has both pedagogical and administrative implications, as students benefit from having other students learning the same material at the same time. We need to maintain (if not extend) this benefit while accommodating variable time-to-completion. Institutions need to be able to register and process students on an ongoing basis. This is technically simple, but not as easy as you might imagine given the embedded nature of these administrative systems in our institutions. It’s certainly not business as usual, but the benefits could be tremendous.

Dr. Michelle R. Weise is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute specializing in disruptive innovation in higher education. She co-authored a book with Clayton M. Christensen about how online competency-based education will revolutionize the workforce and disrupt higher education titled, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution. Michelle’s commentaries and research have been featured in a number of publications such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Inside HigherEd, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and USA Today. Prior to joining the Institute, Michelle served as the Vice President of Academic Affairs for Fidelis Education. She has also held instructional positions, serving as a professor at Skidmore College as well as an instructor at Stanford University. Michelle is a former Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Stanford. :: Q1. You recently co-authored a paper with Clayton Christensen, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution that considered the potential of competency-based higher education. What is the key take-away of the paper?  Our publication highlights online competency-based education (CBE) aligned to labor market needs as an early-stage threat that will strengthen over the years to become a significant workforce solution. These learning providers are hitting the mark by combining the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers, and the right business model. There is a flexible architecture to competencies, which enables providers to stack together modules of learning easily and cost-effectively for a wide variety of industries and specializations. Although most of the innovation in CBE is currently occurring in traditional degree programs, online CBE is almost more powerful in the way that it can be used to build pathways that do not necessarily end in degrees. Q2. The concept of "lifelong learning" has been around for at least a couple of decades. It underscores the idea that people need to continually recreate their professional lives through education. Setting aside the impact of an aging population in Western nations on the average age of learners, are we seeing a significant growth in demand for adult, lifelong learning?  Yes, the four years of college at the front-end of a lifetime are simply no longer a guarantee for career. Particularly with rapid advancements in technologies, more and more working adults are seeing the need to skill up—simply to maintain their current jobs. McKinsey has this incredible statistic: between September 2009 and June 2012—in less than three years—the number of skillsets needed in the workforce increased from 178 to 924. We can only imagine how that number will increase with time. As a result, we’ll need more flexible and relevant lifelong learning mechanisms to help us move forward, re-tool, and advance our careers. Q3. I’ve argued elsewhere that the growth of competency-based education will lead, in turn, to a greater lever of attention on measuring learning, for the simple reason that in order to facilitate students moving at different speeds through their programs, we need more accurate and frequent measures of mastery. What will it take for a critical mass of institutions to get to the point that they can offer this level of assessment?  First off, it’s important to underscore that these online CBE programs that seek to facilitate a whole new value network for employers and students are not competing head-on with schools that deliver the traditional 18- to 22-year-old residential college experience. These pathways are and need to be driven by demand—not by accreditors or institutions. And this is what is truly disruptive: Because the employer truly is the ultimate consumer of the graduates in training, employers are really the main stakeholders that need to be persuaded. Many of these online CBE programs are therefore building unique distribution channels by partnering directly with employers and trying to skill up an existing workforce for the opportunities at hand. Employers are able to observe firsthand whether the quality of work or outputs of their employees are markedly different with these new programs in place. Q4. To what extent do employers and educational institutions see the problem of employability differently? How will these differing perspectives impact the growth of CBE?  Skeptics of CBE worry that employers will somehow end up dictating the requirements for student learning. In academia, there’s an intense territoriality over student learning as well as an undeniable scorn for vocational training. But those who disparage vocational training tend to get caught up in its connotations of career education, corporate training, and utility. Vocational training, however, doesn’t necessarily preclude the liberal arts or notions of effective citizenship, well roundedness, or artistry. In fact, as early as 1915, John Dewey argued "nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to only one line of activity." Rather, these new competencies embody what Dewey called "a continuous activity having a purpose" with "an end in view."  

QS, Top Universities 2014. See http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings The Psychology program at Caltech was once identified as one of the top 25 programs of its type by the National Research Council. Unfortunately, as Brewer et al point out, Caltech didn’t have a Psychology program. Great moments like these in the history of university rankings underscore the importance of an institution’s overall reputation on everything it does, what Brewer et al refer to as the "halo effect". But it also points to the emphasis placed on research productivity: high-ranking institutions are those with faculty who have won the most rewards and captured the greatest volume of external research funds. "Institutions do not build prestige in the student market by being innovative or by identifying and meeting new types of student demands. Rather, they build prestige by essentially mimicking the institutions that already have prestige". (link) The most direct route for an institution that wants to move up in the rankings is to mimic the behaviour and structure of those institutions at the top of the ladder. This limited notion of what constitutes "the best" and the type of competition it leads to is, first of all, one of the factors leading to increased tuition levels, which can, in turn, reinforce the hypothesis that the best institutions are also the most expensive. (See this and this analysis of NYU, for example). But it also draws attention away from teaching and learning. "Prestige is expensive to seek, and the rewards come only to the victor."(link) Online Education’s Role in Reconfiguring How We Evaluate Institutions The growth of online higher education may prove to help reconfigure how institutions are evaluated — drawing more attention to instructional quality; here’s why: ~ By virtue of its relative unfamiliarity, online education generates a greater focus on instructional design. To move from the well-established and familiar classroom format to the online space requires the institution and faculty to rethink the process of creating and supporting learning. (Instructional designers are occasionally told by the faculty with whom they work that the process of creating an online course was the first time in their careers that they had had extended conversations with someone about instructional strategies.) ~ The quality of the student’s experience in online education is primarily determined by the quality of instruction; other aspects of the university experience, such as student affairs, parking availability, are less central. ~ Non-elite institutions are often the fastest growing and most ambitious institutions in online education. To a greater extent than elite institutions, these upstarts (e.g. SNHU, WGU) compete on the basis of instructional value. ~ Online education offers new opportunities to measure student learning that, once reported, provides the basis for identifying quality in teaching and learning. These characteristics of online higher education won’t singlehandedly make instructional quality the means by which institutions rise to the top rungs of our current ranking systems. Many students will continue to try to enrol in the most prestigious instituitons with highest admission standards. The more exclusive the institution, the greater its value in the labour market. Yet the rise of online education may work alongside other developments, such as the utilitarian approach to education taken by the growing number of adult learners, to reconfigure how institutions are ranked and the relative importance of instructional quality.

America’s "No Confidence" Vote on College Grads’ Work Readiness Excerpt: "Ninety-six percent of Americans say it is "somewhat" or "very" important for adults in the country to have a degree or certificate beyond high school. . . . Only 13% of Americans strongly agree college graduates in this country are well-prepared for success in the workplace." Read the full report :: Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and Online Learning Excerpt: "It is our intent that these reports will serve to introduce academics, administrators, and students to the rich history of technology in education with a particular emphasis of the importance of the human factors: social interaction, well-designed learning experiences, participatory pedagogy, supportive teaching presence, and effective techniques for using technology to support learning." Read the full report :: Competency-Based Higher Education: Q&A with Dr. Michelle Weise Excerpt: "Dr. Michelle R. Weise is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute specializing in disruptive innovation in higher education. She co-authored a book with Clayton M. Christensen about how online competency-based education will revolutionize the workforce and disrupt higher education titled, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution." Read the full interview :: Online Higher Education: Notes on Instructional Quality and Rankings Excerpt: "The Psychology program at Caltech was once identified as one of the top 25 programs of its type by the National Research Council. Unfortunately, as Brewer et al point out, Caltech didn’t have a Psychology program. Great moments like these in the history of university rankings underscore the importance of an institution’s overall reputation on everything it does, what Brewer et al refer to as the "halo effect". But it also points to the emphasis placed on research productivity: high-ranking institutions are those with faculty who have won the most rewards and captured the greatest volume of external research funds." Read the full article  

Building a Culture of Innovation in Higher Education Rare is an instructional document that focuses innovation in higher education; a welcome addition to the literature. "Rethinking something, tinkering with it, breaking it apart and starting over, all requires an innovator’s mindset. But how can higher education institutions cultivate that? And who is already doing work in this area to make it happen? That’s what this report works to uncover and share." Access the report here.  This document is a follow up to 2014′s "So You Think You Want to Innovate". :: Lessons for the Future of Digital Courseware in Higher Education (3 Part Series) Another useful effort from Tyton Partners, Time for Class: Lessons for the Future of Digital Courseware in Higher Education, a three-part series. Part One: Faculty Perspectives on Courseware Part Two: Evolution of Courseware Suppliers Part Three (coming soon) I particularly like the relatively "on-the-ground" focus of the papers from Tyton Partners. I think we have all seen too many vague, generalized papers that try to sum up a diverse range of issues in educational technology. What’s needed is a sharper focus on particular issues and technologies, as this series offers on digital courseware. :: Who’s to Blame for High Costs? Debate around what has caused long-term increases in costs in higher education is slowly shifting from biased assertions of blame to more thoughtful analysis. A recent contribution to the dialogue comes by way of Demos, left-of-centre think tank in New York. (Questions for readers: Is Demos New York affiliated with Demos, a UK-based think-tank? Access the analysis here. Also see this review of the report from Inside Higher Ed. "Report says administrative bloat, construction booms not largely responsible for tuition increases." "The report attempts to pinpoint the factors driving up the price for students seeking a four-year degree at a public college. It asserts that while rising administrative and construction costs are a factor, they’re not as gargantuan as widely believed. A decline in state funding is the real culprit, says author Robbie Hiltonsmith, a senior policy analyst with Demos. "          

One of the skills I’ve come to appreciate in leaders of online and hybrid education is the ability to evaluate not just the value of the ever-increasing range of new technologies, instructional methods, and business models on offer, but also how well these different opportunities align with the unique organizational design, processes and culture of our colleges and universities. They recognize that "fit" is all-important. As more opportunities and solutions get thrust in front of academic leaders, they need to demonstrate an understanding of instructional value with a sensitivity towards how these different opportunities will or won’t succeed within the institutional setting. For the purpose of illustration, consider the difference between the LMS and the version of MOOCs originally presented by Udacity and Coursera. MOOCs a la Udacity and Coursera Despite the excitement created by these courses and the fact that they came from elite institutions, getting institutions to grant academic credit proved difficult. The problem wasn’t so much a lack of a clear revenue model, as was often argued, but that the value of these courses, despite their pedigree, was largely dependent on their being accepted for credit. With acceptance for credit, their value would leap and the revenue would follow. Asking institutions to adopt these courses for credit ran headlong into a number of entrenched interests and practices. Here are a few: 1 . . . Elite institutions benefit when they maximize exclusivity; this is an enduring marker of quality in the higher education marketplace. They accomplish this through high tuition levels (pre-discounts), but primarily through tougher admission standards. Providing open admission to MOOCs that, not incidentally base their value on their similarity to the "real" courses offered at elite institution, works against the imperative of exclusivity. 2 . . . If MOOCs were accepted for credit, a sizeable percentage of the higher education market would be compelled to establish themselves as suppliers in this new marketplace. (A new version of "publish or perish"?) But if the market for MOOCs operated like other markets, and I don’t know why it wouldn’t, the vast majority of institutions would be in the role of consumers; they would adopt courses built elsewhere. The adopted courses would bear the marks of the institution and academics from which they originated. However, higher education is organized such that each institution and each faculty member is hired and rewarded on the basis of subject matter expertise; they are expected to be the source of knowledge for the students that attend. For institutions, this is reflected in the way faculty research and rewards serves as the basis for rankings. (QS University rankings, for example, calculate the number of awards granted faculty to compile its list.) With respect to individual faculty, demonstration of subject-matter expertise isn’t merely a requirement for employment and the means of promotion, but part of their professional (and I would suggest, personal) identity. It’s what makes them different from mere "teachers". The misalignment of this version of MOOCs and higher education was evident in the concerns raised by some of San Jose State University faculty who were asked to use a MOOC from Harvard; they wrote: "Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education." In his refusal to serve as faculty for another MOOC, Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD described the venture as a form of academic "colonialism". ____ Arizona State University is launching a different and very promising new tactic for leveraging the potential of MOOCs. Stuart Butler of the Brookings Institute provides a good overview, here. ____ 3 . . . Institutions may also have seen the early version of MOOCs as a threat to a key source of revenue — high-enrolment courses. Accepting credits from students who enrolled in MOOCs at other institutions, or offering free or low cost MOOCs at their own institution, may cut into the revenue that goes a long-way toward funding other parts of the institution (i.e. cost-shifting). Because of these and other obstacles, the MOOC model defined by Udacity and Coursera was perceived as often as a threat as an opportunity. In lieu of acceptance of these courses for academic credit, or the emergence of alternative forms of credentials from outside higher education proper, this particular approach to MOOCs reduced the effort to a promotional vehicles for elite universities that didn’t really need promotion, and examples of innovation from institutions with the least to gain from change in higher education. The LMS: A Perfect Fit On the other hand, learning management systems were quickly and widely adopted when they first landed fifteen-plus years ago. Their success was predicated on the fact that they fit easily into the existing organizational model of higher education. The technology was expressly designed to allow individual educators to create and deliver their own courses — without significant assistance or mediation by the institution. Which is, of course, how classroom higher education has long been organized. This kept the cost of putting courses online down (by minimizing the need for additional labour), adhered to conventional notions of academic autonomy, and didn’t require a significant modification to institutional practices. By mirroring the existing organizational design the LMS may have inadvertently reinforced an approach to online course design and development — the "lone-wolf" model — that is actually quite ill-suited to the demands and possibilities of online education. Nevertheless, it fit the needs of the institution well. At Acrobatiq we spend a lot of time ensuring that the learning analytics, courseware and authoring platform we offer fits easily into the existing institutional model. Our ability to do this well shouldn’t be surprising, though: the company and the technology were born in Carnegie Mellon University, and our team consists of many former university educators and staff. Higher education is our home turf.

:: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." The idea at the core of this quote has been rehashed so often and by so many public figures that it’s now difficult to be certain of its origins (Woodrow Wilson?). But the relevance and longevity of the quote likely owes less to the actual insignificance of the debates in higher education, than its unrestrained quality. We have a tendency in higher education to not hold back. There is no end to the topics worth debating: rising costs in higher education (and who’s to blame), identity politics, the "adjunctification" of academic labor, and rising calls for accountability, to name but a few. The role of educational technology is now a frequent focus. There’s more of it, too. The Internet has dramatically increased the number of venues to facilitate debate. And just as importantly, its’ allowed many of the interactions between warring camps to be anonymous - a perfect recipe. Faculty v. Administration Debate in higher education is frequently organized along the lines of faculty versus administration. I’ve been on both sides of the fence and the differences are striking. More often than not, the context for public debate favours academics. The rules of engagement and the skills required to compete effectively suit them well. Academics tend to be granted more freedom to publicly and passionately weigh-in on issues pertaining to higher education. Of course, serving as public intellectuals is considered part of the job - although only a fraction of academics do this regularly. The opportunity to speak-up is not limited to the academic’s area of expertise (e.g. neuro-engineering), but includes anything related to the institution.  And when they do speak, it’s as individuals, buffered by academic freedom, not as representatives of an institution. It’s not surprising, then, that academics feel able to speak from the heart and with more passion, which in turn tends to generate more attention and, amongst audiences with limited knowledge of the topic under discussion, passion, certainty and the title of "professor" is often more than what is required to be perceived as in-the-know. Not least important, academics tend to be very good at debating. It’s a core skill of the occupation and I think, as a group, they may be more comfortable with the flurry and exchange of ideas than almost any other category of professionals. Administrators, on the other hand, are expected to be far more circumspect in their public statements. When they speak publicly they are representing an entire organization, unlike academics. Nor do administrators have the protection of academic freedom. Not surprisingly, administrators are often less skilled at debate. Administrators may be at a disadvantage, then, given the rules of engagement that structure public debates.  This isn’t to suggest that administrators are powerless. Indeed, I think it’s safe to assume that administrators have more power and universities are "more manageable" than a quarter century ago, much to chagrin of most academics. But this increased power may not be a result of administration’s effectiveness at public debate. Having said this, both faculty and administrators are operating within a broader social and political climate that limits thoughtful debate. We seem to have less patience for nuanced arguments, quicker to publicly shame people we disagree with, and more anxious about offending others (and lawsuits). Freedom to speak honestly and accurately, regardless of your views or the position you hold, improves the quality and value of debate for everyone. At a time when the issues shaping higher education are more important than ever, we can’t afford to suppress conversation further . :: Mary Lewis, PhD, Professor of History at Harvard has been compiling a list of interesting articles that concern key subjects of debate in higher education. Available here. Keith Hampson PhD is part of the team at Acrobatiq, a Carnegie Mellon University venture.  

:: Design and Technology We’ve written about the role of good design in educational technology and media before. See here and here. Former RSID President, John Maeda, provides an excellent overview the growing integration of design (and designers) and technology. File (Slide deck): Design in Tech Report 2015 :: What Do Great College Professors Have in Common? Simple, but a good set of reminders about what often makes the difference for students.   File: MindShift.  :: Big Data and Learning Analytics in Blended Learning Environments: Benefits and Concerns By Anthony Picciano, a well-written and accessible journal article about the use of learning analytics in blended environments. File: PDF available here. :: Lobbying and Regulation in Higher Education As you likely know, a number of the proprietary colleges and universities in the US are sliding into financial trouble, brought on by declining enrolments. (Another recent sign: Wells Fargo recently chose to stop covering the education sector.) Pressure on these organizations also comes by way of regulation, such as those targeting "gainful employment". Some of the proposed regulations apply equally to non-profit institutions that, according to these two articles, has lead to for-profit and non-profit institutions working in-concert to lobby against more regulatory oversight. Interesting times.   File: Fighting Obama Education Plans, Colleges Boost Lobbying File: The Disturbing Reason Higher Education Lobbying Groups Are Supporting For-Profit Colleges  

:: If you’re responsible for leading your college’s growth in technology-supported learning, you don’t need to be told that the range of options for how you go about it are expanding rapidly. A growing variety of software products, instructional models, and partnership arrangements have emerged over the last 3 or 4 years. Failure to make sense of this quickly evolving space can inhibit institutions from making the best decisions or, in the worst case scenario, no decisions at all. Clear and relevant analysis of the online higher education space is more important than ever. Tyton Partners (formerly Education Growth Advisors) continues to offer reports of value to both institutions and the vendors that serve them. They’ve distinguished themselves from other private consulting firms by focussing much of their growing body of work on instructional issues. For good reason: it’s here, rather than in the areas of marketing and administration (the primary focus for many private firms), that higher education has the greatest opportunity to bend the "iron triangle" of costs, quality and access. "Time for Class: Lessons for the Future of Digital Courseware in Higher Education" is a three-part series that considers the current state of the digital courseware market. Digital courseware is defined for the purposes of the study as "curriculum delivered through purpose-built software to support teaching and learning". Over 2,700 faculty and administrators (presumably all in the US), were surveyed and combined with an internal analysis of over 120 courseware products. (My notes concern only the first two instalments; the third paper is forthcoming.) :: Their conclusion? Digital courseware enjoys high awareness and significant use by faculty, but "leaves many users woefully dissatisfied and also faces considerable barriers to further adoption." The dissatisfaction stems, in part, from the fact that the suppliers are focused on "efficacy" — the quality and impact of the courseware on student learning outcomes. But faculty and administrator placed a great deal of emphasis on other factors, such as "impact on faculty time, faculty control over instructional method and course experience, and technical integration challenges." "While our research substantiates the importance of efficacy, it also provides insights into faculty experiences and perspectives that challenge the notion of efficacy as a silver bullet to drive courseware adoption. The existence of other significant barriers to adoption, along with high levels of dissatisfaction with courseware products, suggests that efforts must be made to bring down multiple barriers if we are to see digital courseware implemented with greater scale and with favorable impact on student outcomes. By listening to faculty demands for simpler products that are less time-consuming to adopt and customize, and by evaluating institutional conditions for use, suppliers and institutions could make digital courseware a less daunting tool for faculty to adopt." We certainly agree with the importance placed on ease-of-use and institutional alignment. Acrobatiq totally reconfigured the user experience of its courseware and platform to make it simple and engaging for both students and faculty. Given our deep roots in academia, we are intimately familiar with the importance of the alignment with institutional practices and culture. Recently, we argued that one of the most qualities of great educational technology leaders in higher education " . . .  is the ability to evaluate not just the value of the ever-increasing range of new technologies, instructional methods, and business models on offer, but also how well these different opportunities align with the unique organizational design, processes and culture of our colleges and universities. They recognize that "fit" is all-important." :: We need more studies that look at the experiences and perceptions of faculty and administrators as they try to make the best use of available resources. Due to the capital-intensive demands of technology and services, institutions will likely continue to turn to vendors and consortia for many of their needs as they expand their footprints in online higher education. Time for Class is a useful contribution to this goal. But the study could have been enhanced by a more narrowly defined concept of courseware, as well as greater consideration for the importance of survey respondents different knowledge of the subject. As it is, not all respondents were properly prepared to provide meaningful answers to the questions posed by the research. The survey asks faculty and administrators to provide an assessment of how well the courseware is serving their needs. This seems appropriate given that, according to the study, a whopping 96% of respondents are "aware or somewhat aware" of digital courseware and 54% have used it within the last year. But the study then also notes that the respondents actual knowledge of the products was very low: "Faculty and administrators have a high awareness of courseware as a category but very low awareness of specific products and offerings." " . . . Furthermore, we found a widespread lack of recognition of courseware as a category distinct from learning management systems and course delivery solutions (e.g., homework tools, lecture capture tools, content management systems) . . ." "Over half of our respondents did not or could not name the product that they used. Over half of those who did respond named learning management systems." The lack of knowledge is exacerbated by the very broad definition of courseware used in the study, which included: textbook bundles assess and adjust learning experiences interactive textbooks open education resources (OER) course products game or role-based experiences custom courseware tools These are not merely different versions of a single category of educational products, but different categories. But more to the point, we know that these types of products differ in ways that directly impact the criteria used in the analysis. The impact on faculty workload, for example, is radically different for OER than it is for deploying an interactive textbook. Similarly, the ability of a faculty member to customize game-based experiences is very different than when they are simply using an LMS. (See the reference to "LMS" above.) :: To enhance our understanding of how well courseware is serving academia, we need to be confident that the study participants have a solid understanding of what is being assessed. This will, in turn, provide vendors and education professionals with a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities for implementing courseware that meets the institution’s needs.      

:: 2015 Internet Trends Report Read the report. http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends The annual report from Mary Meeker of KPB. Excellent collection of data points. You Draw It: How Family Income Affects Children’s College Chances How likely is it that children who grow up in very poor families go to college? How about children who grow up in very rich families? We’d like you to draw your guess for every income level on the chart below. Test your knowledge!  It’s All About the Money Excerpt: Markets and money have always mattered in American higher education, but not nearly as much as they do today. Throughout much of the 20th century, a well-educated citizenry was regarded as the ticket to national prosperity, and that shared belief was the rationale for spending tax dollars to underwrite public universities. The tacit bargain that states made with their flagship universities was simple—the state would subsidize these institutions to keep tuition low if they delivered a world-class education to the best and brightest state residents, and produced research that contributed to the common good. Under the terms of that bargain, enrollment mushroomed and America’s premier universities became the best in the world. In The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz demonstrate that this bet on higher education explains why, in the decades after the Second World War, the United States became the world’s richest nation. Read the full article.   Keeping it on the Company Campus (The Economist) As more firms have set up their own "corporate universities", they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school. Read the full article here.