The assets of a nation are no longer in its subterranean natural resources such as petroleum, iron ore, gold, silver, and diamonds. The assets of a nation in the 21st century are primarily between the ears of its citizens.41 This reality is the driving force behind the explosive worldwide growth in demand for education.
An irony facing many college and university presidents is that demand for higher education has never been greater, but neither has the competition and the pressure for change. Edu-tech offers numerous opportunities for both growth and decline. A temptation is to sit tight and hope all of the push toward TEE will go away. After all, television was supposed to drastically change education, but in the end had much less influence than expected. Perhaps the Internet, the desktop computer, multimedia, hypermedia, technology-enabled pedagogy, and private-sector competition are all passing fads, too. We do not think so. We recommend that colleges and universities initiate deliberate strategic planning, each institution assessing its individual situation and creating a comprehensive plan for the coming decades.
41YUKOS Oil, Russia’s second largest oil company, recently announced a program that dramatically reinforces the refocusing of a nation from minerals and hydrocarbons to knowledge industries. Under the project title of Generation.ru, the national initiative funded by Yukos is intended to train a total of 10 million young Russians in Internet technologies by the year 2005.
According to YUKOS chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, “Production of competitive intellectual and information products and not oil should become Russia’s main industry.” (Press release, YUKOS Oil, 3/22/00)
Although we believe that the most appropriate strategies for each institution will vary by institution, there are some general issues that all may wish to consider. Here, we offer some generalized proposals, recognizing that they most likely will not apply in all situations. We hope that these suggestions may be relevant in structuring the thinking of a college or university president in these interesting times.
1. Strategic Alliances. Hundreds of for-profits are now seeking to grab the attention of elite colleges and universities. Their song: Sign with us and get these rewards! Many sought-after educational institutions have endowments of hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars. In contrast, some of the dot-com suitors can only guarantee payments for several month’s payroll, if that. Why would a financially secure college or university bet its future in distance learning with a marginally funded dot- com startup? Yes, the pressure is on to do something, and to do it more quickly than universities and colleges are accustomed to. But do not bet the ranch on a hugely risky venture. Our own belief is that, should an educational institution want to align itself with a for-profit redistributor of distance education offerings, its best option is often to form a consortium with like-minded sister institutions and create its own for-profit spin-off.
Why should a months-old dot-com reap the benefits of an institution’s significant brand-equity, built up over decades and perhaps centuries?
2. Learning Continues After Graduation. An educational institution’s active alumni constitute a primary hidden market for its instructional offerings. As we have argued, with reasonable assumptions, an institution can double its course enrollments if meaningful lifetime educational services are offered to its alumni. The college or university that an adolescent enters at age 18 can become the default educator for life of that individual. If a university president is looking for revenue growth opportunities as well as for increased allegiance with its alumni base, then providing lifelong learning to alumni seems to be a low-hanging fruit.
3. Institutional Resistance to Change. One measure of the fluidity of an institution is the average time it takes to get a 50% turnover in personnel.
That figure provides a rough estimate of the time required to erase institutional memories and enable the organization to welcome significant change. For a high-tech firm, this duration may be only six months; for a university with its tenure system, it is closer to 20 years! The potential changes that will be brought about by edu-tech are monumental and will be resisted by many. So-called faculty culture is part of this. Faculty members grow accustomed to the way things are and have always been, and do not often react favorably to significant change in their environment or increased demands on their time. The first coauthor of this essay, himself a tenured faculty member, even pleads guilty to this charge. A college or university president has the challenge of introducing programs and processes to move the faculty culture in directions more compatible with change in teaching and learning. Having a college or university support faculty-initiated innovations can be a helpful first step in this
process, with the success of early adopters creating faculty market demand for further innovations.42
4. Who Owns What? Edu-tech promises nightmares for college and university administrators in the domain of intellectual property (IP).
Textbooks have traditionally been the purview of faculty members, who have been free to write the books and sign royalty-granting contracts with publishers. The Web is creating challenges to that model. Often a Web- creation by a faculty member is aided greatly by other campus-employed professionals, such as graphic designers, Web developers, photographers, animators, and video production specialists. In these circumstances, the realization of a faculty member’s intellectual vision is in a multimedia form that requires major investment by the university. Some universities now contend that IP is shared or perhaps even 100% owned by them. But boundaries are fuzzy and exact definitions appear to be sorely lacking.
We are not aware of any college or university that has established a clear, crisp, concise, and unambiguous IP policy for Web-based educational creations. As a result, campuses have all sorts of Web learning modules being made with many differing interpretations regarding who owns what.
Unless this situation is resolved soon in a deliberate fashion by those who are directly involved—faculty and their administrations—the eventual resolution will derive from new case law as a result of contentious lawsuits. This seems to be a terrible way to fashion policy on IP. The issue may be too large and difficult for one institution to lead the way and set a precedent. Perhaps it is time for leadership from many higher- education institutions to utilize one of their many interinstitutional alliances and to attempt to craft edu-tech IP policies that could be accepted by all.
5. Conduct Research Onto Learning. A research university has two core competencies: research and education. Rarely do the two coincide in the form of research on education. One way to change the faculty culture in an exciting and culture-compatible manner is to introduce the notion of doing scholarly research on education and learning in one’s own domain of excellence, be it physics, Shakespeare, economics, microelectronics, or operations research. How do students best learn Newtonian mechanics?
How do they get excited and engaged in Shakespeare? How do we design learning environments in mathematics to achieve deeper and longer lasting learning? Faculty members pursuing this approach become active designers of educational experiments that can be carefully evaluated and reported in a growing scholarly literature. The fact that students’ activities
42This is one step that MIT has taken recently, with upwards of $5,000,000/year available to faculty for experiments in TEE via an open RFP process.
can be better tracked in Web-based learning environments offers important opportunities for data mining, allowing for new analyses of students’ learning activities, learning styles, and knowledge acquisition.
Recent programs at Stanford, RPI, Vanderbilt, and MIT have indicated some success at this approach.
6. Prepare for New Competitors. The private sector wants to profit from the large courses that in some sense are commodities in our institutions of higher education. These include the core courses taken by all freshmen and many sophomores. Imagine that by the year 2010 each of these subjects will be available in multiple versions from for-profit companies or other universities. There may or may not be live tutors available, either locally or via the Internet. Course providers will charge a tuition that is a fraction of usual brick-and-mortar tuition. To make matters worse, each such course will have had at least $2 million to $5 million invested in its design and creation. Picture the next equivalent to the young Paul A. Samuelson, who creates with Pixar-quality producers the next version of Economics 101, but this time web-based with all the features we have discussed and more. It could become a true category killer, just as Samuelson’s original textbook has been for decades. We at the nonprofit institutions face the huge risk that the private sector will eat our lunch in these large courses, courses that generally subsidize the remaining parts of the curriculum due to their large enrollments and cost- favorable student-teacher ratios. One plausible response to this threat is to join the competition: License the Internet versions of these courses but add value to the student’s experience by providing local mentoring and active learning opportunities. In that way, the combination of high- production-value, professionally produced learning materials with carefully crafted local mentoring and learning creates an enriched learning environment that cannot be duplicated.
7. Students Will Benefit From Change. The new technologies offer potentially enormous improvements in pedagogical models. Students with differing cultural backgrounds, learning styles, and prerequisite knowledge will eventually benefit from edu-tech. Ultimately, each student’s learning environment may be specially tailored to his or her own situation, an exemplary application of mass customization. Old-fashioned campus-based course packs will become a thing of the past, as materials available online will be far superior and offer vastly more content.
Students will study in an immense nonlinear space of knowledge, offered from around the world over digital networks, not preselected and prepackaged by a local professor. With or without deliberate interinstitutional collaboration, it will exist in this way with our students.
Local controls over content will thereby deteriorate, creating yet another challenge to maintaining the brand equity of one’s institution.
8. Prepare for New Financial Models. Since the 1970s, nearly all major service sectors in the U.S. have undergone substantial and fundamental change. This has not yet happened in the higher-education
sector. We believe that it will. The pressures on tuition will increase as major for-profit providers enter the higher education marketplace and as brick-and-mortar universities and colleges start to compete with one another via distance learning. Commodity-based higher education for large-enrollment core courses will likely become better and cheaper.
Retaining a viable market for high-priced on-campus education will be a challenge for every college and university president, first for the so-called non-elites and eventually—we believe—for all. The perceived value- added from the on-campus experience will most likely lie in the market niche that a college or university selects as its focus going forward.
Creating a workable financial model under these assumptions will be a huge challenge, suggesting both defensive and offensive strategies and opportunities. The core of the defense could be choosing and defending a particular market niche. The essence of the offensive strategy could be the exporting of some part of that niche expertise via the Internet and related technologies. But one does not want the exporting to cannibalize one’s core on-campus market. It will be a challenging and exciting time, one requiring the skills and deftness of a high wire balancing act.