Disruptions have only begun to reshape advanced education
I wince every time I read someone write about the “devastating” cuts to advanced education.
Devastation? It’s time to wake up and smell reality.
Reality example one: A rather tiny campus, Southern New Hampshire University, is home to 2,750 undergrads. One would never suspect that another 25,000 students are enrolled online, making it one of the biggest, fastestgrowing online operations of any university, with forecasted revenues of more than $200 million.
Example two: Coursera, a for-profit venture, taps professors from Princeton, Stanford and 60 other universities and has more than 2.7 million registered students (most outside of the U.S.), who pay nothing to access the world’s best professors. Coursera has announced many of its courses have been approved for undergraduate credit by the American Council on Education.
Example three: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been recoding all their courses and making them available for free online. They now have 2,080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times. MIT started this Open Course ware Movement in — wait for it — 2001.
The cuts to advanced education are not what is devastating. What is devastating is trying to maintain an old academic model that doesn’t work anymore.
Within the next decade, millions of students will flourish without ever setting foot on traditional campuses. Advanced education is vulnerable to the kinds of disruption that the music, newspaper, video rental and other industries have experienced.
Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, an expert in innovation, predicts that within 15 years half of all universities will be out of business. Now that’s devastation! Patrick J. McKenna, Edmonton