Online wave redirecting studies
AUTOMATION and artificial intelligence are transforming manufacturing, office work and retailing, providing opportunities for companies to explore and posing major threats to those that don’t adapt.
Equally daunting challenges confront colleges and universities, but they’ve been slower to acknowledge them.
Universities are at present focused on competition from colleges or training systems using online learning technology. But that is just one aspect of the technological changes under way.
For example, some companies are moving towards requiring that workers have specific skills training and certification – as opposed to university degrees.
As a professor who researches artificial intelligence and offers distance learning courses, I can say that online education is a disruptive challenge for which universities are ill-prepared. A lack of student demand is already closing 800 of the roughly 10 000 engineering colleges in India.
And online learning has put as many as half of the universities in the US at risk of shutting in the next few decades as remote students get a comparable education over the internet – without living on campus or taking classes in person.
Unless universities move quickly to transform into educational institutions for a technology-assisted future, they risk becoming obsolete. religious administration.
These institutions amassed huge repositories of knowledge, storing and indexing them in libraries, which became the focal point of the campus.
As European countries explored the world and established overseas colonies from the 15th and 16th centuries, universities evolved to train officers to manage those territories, study navigation across the oceans and look after colonists’ health.
After the Industrial Revolution, colleges changed again, teaching workers how to use new scientific and technological methods and tools.
In the 21st century, the workplace is transforming once more. What businesses, governments and societies need from education is shifting.
Technology has made the bricks-and-mortar library obsolete. Users of a technology previously needed to know how it worked. In the early days of driving, for instance, it was important for a driver to be able to fix a car that broke down on the side of the road, perhaps far from a mechanic.
In the current post-industrial economy, that has changed. Even a mechanic uses a computer to connect to car systems to identify what is not working properly.
Few people need to know how these internal computer systems work; they just need to be able to interpret sensor readings and error messages.
Artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning and computer vision are permanently eliminating highly skilled jobs in offices, too.
Many economies – including that of the US – are turning from manufacturing to services, in which most new jobs do not require advanced education.
The remaining jobs will involve fewer routine tasks. The people doing that work will still need some education beyond high school. But they may not need to attend classes at, or even live on, a physical university campus.
Universities outside the top tier of quality and name recognition, and those that have taken on substantial debt to build physical facilities, will suffer as demand for their services lessens. US has reached $1.45trillion (R17.28 trillion) and as many as 20% of borrowers may not be earning enough to pay them back.
Universities may highlight the intangible values of in-person learning, such as personal contact and non-verbal communication, but the costs are becoming a larger factor.
Parents and students in the US are increasingly asking whether it’s worth spending about $30 000 or even more than $60 000 for less than 240 days of lectures in an elite private residential university – more than $250 a night.
Private universities’ main competition at the moment comes from public universities. Their prices are two-thirds lower, but studying still involves taking many courses that are just as easily taught online.
Soon students will want to take a variety of courses from different universities, choosing each class for its particular merits and benefits. That will stiffen competition among institutions, lowering students’ costs and universities’ revenues.
Courses will become shared experiences for online learning communities. Some universities might seek to charge students for special in-person learning experiences, but these will be extras for those who can afford them, not the higher education norm they are today.
Some universities – those at the top, with the most money and expertise – are responding to the changes to higher education. Some are forming partnerships with international universities and online teaching companies, or building remote-learning programmes on their own.
Some of these, like the Harvard Extension School, are hi-tech adaptations of correspondence courses people used to take by mail. Harvard Extension School enrols nearly 2000 degree and more than 13 000 non-degree students, who take classes online, on campus or a mix of both.
Students can earn a BA degree in extension studies. At an estimated cost of $49 500, a four-year degree is cheaper than a single year on campus at Harvard.
But most of the people who take its classes never get a degree. They’re just looking for one particular course, or maybe a few, customising their own education.
Employers will soon also take advantage of such options. Universities will find themselves asked to build specific programmes for particular companies and will need to explore other ways artificial intelligence technologies can help reduce the cost of education.
Subhash Kak is Regents Professor, electrical and computer engineering, Oklahoma State University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.