The Role of Disruptive Technology in the Future of Higher Education

Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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SCUP Link

A particularly interesting read if you need a brush-up on your understanding of the impact of disruptive technologies, although this article from EDUCAUSE Quarterly by Katrina A. Meyer is focused on online learning.

So what does the theory of disruption — and the tools that disrupt existing models of teaching and learning — mean for the future of higher education? First, we will hear new software or tools labeled “disruptive technologies” as frequently as we do now. It is guaranteed that the future will see more disruptive technologies, since we seem to like the idea and find it in many forms. Second, simple faith in disruption is faith poorly placed. No tool, on its own, is likely to produce disruption. Disruption takes upsetting the status quo, focusing on student-centered learning, changing relationships, sharpening our insight, and designing instruction to increase learning and lower costs. Third, some tools will and some won’t be truly disruptive. Those that are will probably force a pause in our usual thinking, a reassessment of past procedures, a letting go of past assumptions, and an introduction of a new perspective that opens a new way for doing our work. Truly innovative disruption prompted by technology in higher education will force us to think in new ways, providing opportunities for the changes needed for higher education to survive and thrive.

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SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III

College Degrees Without Going to Class

More than one-fourth of all college students are taking at least one online class. In its "Room for Debate" series, The New York Times recently asked a number of commentators "Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?" Respondents include: Greg von Lehmen, provost and chief academic officer at University of Maryland University College (as good as classroom lessons); Robert Zemsky, professor of education and chairman of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania (another false gold rush); Anya Kamenetz, author of the forthcoming DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (better and cheaper); Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (making the personal connection); Karen Swan, James Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield (flexibility and time); and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (needs more tech support). A good discussion.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Teach Online or Wither: Leveraging Technology to Increase Enrollment, Capacity, and Revenues

Arthur F. Kirk, president of St. Leo University, writing in University Business magazine: "But you need online courses and online programs. Traditional and non-traditional students increasingly demand—and often require—them. The time may have passed for the "big growth" strategy, but if you want to protect what you have and hopefully grow it, you need to be online, now! Since 2002, online education grew by a compounded annual rate of 19.7 percent. It grew 12.9 percent in 2007, according to Sloan data. During that same period, overall collegiate enrollments grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate . . . What is required? The first component of success is institutional commitment. Far too many schools falter because of vocal pockets of faculty resistance and lack of strong leadership. Smaller private not-for-profit colleges remain the least likely to offer online classes or programs. Yet a majority of them embrace a mission to educate working adults and/or depend upon those students to balance budgets. While chief academic officers generally believe that faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online courses, fewer than half of private college CAOs believe their faculty do so . . . Those opinions ignore mountains of data that demonstrate no differences in learning outcomes between online and classroom courses. They also ignore the National Survey of Student Engagement, in which "distance education" students reported being more engaged than traditional students. Negative faculty opinions run counter to those of business leaders. According to Excelsior College/Zogby International's online survey of business executives, among those familiar with online programs, '83 percent strongly believe that degrees earned via online programs are viewed favorably compared with those earned in a more traditional way.'

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

The Imagined Space of The Web 2.0 Classroom

Note that SCUP–45 plenary speaker, and SCUPer, Mark Valenti (of The Sextant Group) is one of our own experts in this realm. His presentation will bring you the state of the art!

Trent Batson, writing in Campus Technology magazine, explores physical classrooms and virtual classrooms, and the influences that one type may have on the design of the other:

Accommodating technology, that is, making it usable in a room, does require many changes: Rooms should be square or rounded instead of rectangular since sight-lines and visual display of information is now as important as the sound of voices; moving furniture for different ways to work with technology should not cause a sudden roar of noise, chair and table legs scraping on tile, but instead the soft rolling of table and chair on a soft surface. In other words, new classroom design is not based on unquestioned tradition but is based on new practices developed within the field of media architecture.

Note that SCUP has a Lyris-based email Knowledge Community [smartc] with this topical focus. There are more than 500 practitioners who are members of that often quiescent discussion list.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Uh-oh. Twitter.

Like many people over the age of 30, this writer is more than ambivalent about Twitter. Yet Twitter, or things like it, may well be real, live professional tools that we'll be using in 3-5 years. Sigh. But SCUP has been moving more and more into social media, and just from a couple of weeks of beginning to use Twitter, SCUP staff have seen some potential.

This EDUCAUSE Quarterly article sort of hints at some of what we have been thinking and observing, too. Speaking of last year's EDUCAUSE conference, the authors, Joanna C. Dunlap and Patrick R. Lowenthall, are both from the University of Colorado, Denver, note:

At a lively “debate” (“debate” because ultimately both debaters were fairly pro-Twitter), the negative commentary focused on three things: Twitter takes too much time, the content is of questionable value, and it promotes social (or, anti-social) myopic-ness. We do not disagree, but instead have found, as many have,2 that Twitter’s potential as a powerful instructional tool outweighs these negative factors. In this article we share some of the insights gained using Twitter as an instructional tool and explain why we think Twitter, despite its drawbacks (and really the drawbacks of social networking in general), can add value to online and face-to-face university courses.

BTW, you can "follow" "SCUP News" on Twitter here. At the moment we have 161 followers.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

New School Announced: 'The College for Working Families'

Yet another new thing in higher education, brought about by the financial crisis, the "first and only accredited degree-granting online institution devoted exclusively to educating union members."

Here's the press release and here's The New York Times' Steven Greenhouse writing about it:

The A.F.L.-C.I.O., the main umbrella group for the nation’s labor unions, announced on Thursday that it was joining with the National Labor College and the Princeton Review to create an online college for the federation’s 11.5 million members and their families.

The new college, tentatively named the College for Working Families, will seek to “expand job opportunities for its members by providing education and retraining in a way that’s affordable and accessible,” the founders said.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

MANAGING ONLINE EDUCATION: The 2009 WCET-Campus Computing Project Survey of Online Education (22 Oct 2009)

This survey contains more than can be summarized here, but you should go download the executive summary and possibly watch the archived webcast. The bottom line is that online education programs are marked by:

• Rising Enrollments,
• Unsure Profits,
• Organizational Transitions, and
• Higher Fees, and Tech Training for Faculty

The full abstract for the survey report is:

Enrollments are up and rising, profits are often uncertain, and organizational arrangements are in transition according to a new national survey of senior campus officials responsible for managing online and distance education programs conducted by WCET and The Campus Computing Project. Additionally, the new survey data suggest that students enrolled in online programs may pay higher fees than their on-campus counterparts, that many campuses have mandatory training on their faculty before sending them “into the web” to teach online courses, and that quality still looms as a large question for online education programs.

Three questions about enrollments indicate that campuses participating in the survey have experienced healthy gains in good economic times and bad – and that campus officials expect enrollments in their online programs to continue to rise in the coming years. Fully 94 percent of the survey respondents – typically the senior campus officer responsible for online or distance education programs – report enrollment gains in their online programs between 2006 and 2009; almost half (48 percent) report online enrollments rose by 15 percent or more during this period. Similarly, asked about past year numbers (fall 2008 vs. fall 2009), 95 percent report rising enrollment in their online programs; almost two-fifths (38 percent) report a one-year gain in online enrollments of 15 percent or better. Finally, when asked to project enrollments in their online programs over the next three years (2009-2011), 98 percent of the institutions participating in the survey affirm enrollment gains: almost half (47 percent) expect online enrollments grow by 15 percent or more over the next three years.

For more information, please download the accompanying PDF copy of the executive summary and the handout from the WCET Conference presentation on October 22nd. Also available below is the video webcast of the WCET conference presentation.

Is a Virtual Revolution Brewing for Colleges?

This author posits a drastically changed higher education future, by analogizing to the recent history of newspapers.

When this happens -- be it in 10 years or 20 -- we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

Not all colleges will be similarly affected. Like the New York Times, the elite schools play a unique role in our society, and so they can probably persist with elements of their old revenue model longer than their lesser-known competitors. Schools with state funding will be as immune as their budgets. But within the next 40 years, the majority of brick-and-mortar universities will probably find partnerships with other kinds of services, or close their doors.

Free: The University of the People

Have you been hearing about a "free" university? Perhaps the reference is to Shai Reshef's University of the People. Here's a link to a brief Q&A with Reshef in Campus Technology magazine. Here's a link to the school's website. 

When a student signs up, he or she is grouped with 20 other individuals whom they interact with and learn from via homework assignments, discussion questions, and lectures. Students discuss the questions among themselves and participate in a peer-to-peer learning environment. If at any point a peer can't help--or if a student needs more elaboration on a particular topic--then they can visit the course forum. There they will find all university students who are taking the same course, along with volunteers, professors and graduate students who can help with those issues. At the end of each week, students take a quiz on the material they've learned, turn in their homework and receive a grade. The same system is used for all 40 courses that comprise the program.

Positioning Faculty Support as a Strategy in Assuring Quality Online Education

We think that Innovate: Journal of Online Education is quite innovative, in both its Web publishing and the interaction that you can have during live sessions with authors. In the current issue, the article most pertinent for SCUPers is probably the one titled Positining Faculty Support as a Strategy in Assuring Quality Online Education. 

With the rapid growth of online programs and courses at Fort Hays State University (FHSU), the university has faced the challenge of supporting faculty members as they transition to online teaching. Hong Wang, Lawrence V. Gould, and Dennis King share the comprehensive approach the university has developed, an approach that depends on effective cooperation among administrative, professional, and peer support systems. Wang, Gould, and King argue that a strong technical and organizational infrastructure, recognition and financial rewards for faculty, and an integrated approach to course design have allowed FHSU to create a collaborative course development process that provides faculty members with the support they need to design and administer high-quality online instruction.

Designing Choreographies for the "New Economy of Attention"

This is a dense resource that will require some . . . attention . . . but well worth the read:

"This experiment reinforced our assumption that the successful implementation of communication channels should always be embedded in the physical organization of space. Choreographing attention is physical as much as it is cerebral. Digital backchannels have to be designed into space, not in spite of it."

Read on:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000049.html

Online Learning Produces Better Results Than Face-to-Face?

This US Department of Education report, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning, can be download for free (93 pages). According to Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, in the higher education part of the analysis, online learning was unequivocally better than face-to-face, and "blended learning" produced even better results.

Download it here:
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Where is the Distance Education 'Tipping Point'?

When do the realities of having a lot of students doing distance education change your institution, and how? Cerro Coso Community College administrators (That school is past the 50 percent mark) led a discussion recently at the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) meeting. Among the important impacts: Faculty Hiring and Training, Local Ties, and Technology Infrastrucuture.

"What do we change -- if we change anything?" said Dylan D. Mattina, director of information technology, in introducing the session. "This is something that many institutions will have to deal with at some point."

Mattina and others from his college discussed several of the choices colleges need to make as they reach either 50 percent or some other critical mass where the institution is changed by the success of its distance offerings."

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/26/distance

'Thizomic' Knowledge and the Relationship of Technology Adaptation to Institutional Mission and Culture

SCUPer James Morrisson, editor of Innovate: Journal of Online Education, is a fan of "SCUP Links" and we're a fan of his digital-only journal. Often the articles are focused a bit more finely than would be appropriate for SCUP Links, but this month's issue contains some potential gems: "Dave Cormier tackles the difficult theme of knowledge by using the metaphor of the rhizome, a plant with no center and no clear boundary, to describe the way knowledge is created in the context of Web 2.0 technologies. “Knowledge as negotiation” provides a lens through which to view the current community-based notion of curriculum. As social technologies move from our personal lives into academic settings, corresponding community and social interaction around information and knowledge will become an important part of education." Also: Robert G. Henshaw analyzes shifting demographics, labor markets, and related factors in urging higher education to “redefine their institutional culture and missions.” Henshaw links technology-adoption patterns to the ability of institutions to meet the emergent needs of learners as well as the need for institutions to retain faculty."

When the Medium Illustrates the Content: Exploiting the Unique Features of Online Communication

This article "present[s] the results of an evaluation of an online undergraduate course in psychology that adheres to the seven widely accepted principles of effective online teaching and suggests an eighth principle: using the unique benefits and constraints of online communication to prompt critical thinking about various facets of human communication, psychology, sociology, or human-computer interface design. Formative evaluation of this new course, carried out by Foertsch over three semesters, showed that it benefited from an illuminating association between its content—the cognitive and social experiences of people with autism—and its online delivery method, in which students communicated with each other and the professor in asynchronous and synchronous forums that removed the nonverbal social cues present in face-to-face communication. By applying the seven principles to the design of this course, Gernsbacher created a learning environment that 87% of 105 upper-division students rated as "extremely" or "very" useful in developing their critical thinking skills and a course that a number of students described as one of the best they had ever taken."

Online learning: What two-year colleges are doing right

"There's a reason why two-year colleges are leading the pack in online learning growth: these institutions have fully embraced the concept and, as a consequence, are reaping the rewards. 'Growth rates for these associate's institutions have exceeded those of all the other institution types, and they now command over 54% of all online enrollments in the U.S.'"