Information Technology

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face instruction.

The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

Except for one article, on this Web site, you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.

But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion. I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report showing that students in online learning environments performed worse, there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.

I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.

We know that online learning requires devout attention on the part of both the professor and the student -- and a collaboration between the two -- in a different way from that of a face-to-face classroom. These critical aspects of online education are worth particular mention:

• Greater student engagement: In an online classroom, there is no back row and nowhere for students to hide. Every student participates in class.
• Increased faculty attention: In most online classes, the faculty’s role is focused on mentoring students and fostering discussion. Interestingly, many faculty members choose to teach online because they want more student interaction.
• Constant access: The Internet is open 24/7, so students can share ideas and “sit in class” whenever they have time or when an idea strikes -- whether it be the dead of night or during lunch. Online learning occurs on the student’s time, making it more accessible, convenient, and attainable.

At Walden University, where I am president, we have been holding ourselves accountable for years, as have many other online universities, regarding assessment. All universities must ensure that students are meeting program outcomes and learning what they need for their jobs. To that end, universities should be better able to demonstrate -- quantitatively and qualitatively -- the employability and success of their students and graduates.

Recently, we examined the successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming better teachers.

In higher education, there is still too much debate about how we are delivering content: Is it online education, face-to-face teaching, or hybrid instruction? It’s time for us to stop categorizing higher education by the medium of delivery and start focusing on its impact and outcomes.

Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study concluded, online education can do that and much more.

The legal and practical implications of colleges standing in loco parentis (latin for “in the place of the parent”) have waxed and waned over the history of higher education.

Colleges traditionally had the same rights and responsibilities as parents; the power to discipline the student as a parent could, but also the liability for harm that befell the student. Both the rights and responsibilities of in loco parentis began to recede as the Woodstock generation declared its independence. As the boomers asserted their freedoms at colleges and universities across the nation, in loco parentis fell away, and with it came a legal regime that treated colleges and universities as bystanders, rarely responsible for harms that befell students. And yet those same boomers, hovering over their children like “helicopters,” now insist that colleges take responsibility for the actions of their millennial children due to the “special relationship” that they believe forms upon enrollment.

As Inside Higher Ed reported, Security on Campus (SOC), a campus safety advocacy group, has interpreted a recent letter of findings by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) regarding an incident involving a Hofstra University student, to impose a new responsibility on colleges and universities -- “the same obligation to respond to sexual harassment in cyberspace that they have when the harassment occurs in the classroom.”

If what SOC is saying is that they read this findings letter to require campuses to take on the in loco parentis responsibility of protecting students from activities that occur outside of the campus environment, that is not an accurate reading of the OCR decision. Rather, the letter found insufficient evidence of any wrongdoing by the campus inasmuch as the parent of the complainant did not provide sufficient information to the campus.

Contrary to the SOC press release, the letter of findings did not reach the merits of the case. The language cited by SOC as creating a “first of its kind” standard is simply the boilerplate language describing the law and jurisdiction standards that OCR includes in its letters. One sentence of boilerplate that should be noted, however, states “[l]etters of findings are not formal statements of OCR policy and should not be relied upon, cited, or construed as such.”

Juicy Campus and its ilk are a result of some uniquely millennial math. The rise of Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites allowed first young people (and increasingly many older folks, too) to transform their anonymous selves into mini-celebrities, sending out tiny bursts of “press release” on their minute-by-minute activities, opinions on sports, politics and celebrities, and relationship status. The ideal for some was to acquire as many "friends" as possible and send them as many press-release “updates” and “tweets” as time and patience would allow. Concurrently, celebrity blogs like Perez Hilton and Pop Sugar would casually insult traditional celebrities, instantaneously sharing even the glitterati’s most mundane private secrets, while thousands of anonymous comments spewed forth all manner of vitriol. It was not long before the two forces would meet with anonymous students summoning up their e-courage to cyber-slime their mini-celebrity friends and classmates.

What resulted were anonymous gossip sites that targeted ordinary individual students. Juicy Campus was the best known of these sites. Started by a recent Georgetown University graduate in 2007 ostensibly to discuss important campus issues, the site facilitated anyone to post essentially any statement about any topic or any person, true or otherwise. While some topics on these sites are mild, much is lewd, insulting and often times horrifying.

Unlike the “bathroom wall” of old, here professors, potential employers and grandmothers could log onto a Web site and read the gossip. Juicy Campus closed its doors in February of this year, although other, less-well-known sites such as College Anonymous Confession Board (ACB) and Campus Gossip continue on. Juicy Campus may be gone, but the genre is not. Like the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids, the site was universally denounced, but a popular read on campuses. It took the Internet to turn public slander into a private, anonymous weapon which, once created, will never fully recede.

When Juicy Campus arrived on a particular campus, the first instinct of student affairs professionals was one of pure in loco parentis protectionism; they sought to block network access to the site. Two campuses did so. Yet blocking is inadvisable for several reasons.

First, these sites are not hosted on campuses so the college has no more jurisdiction than it does over the bathroom wall of a local bar. Blocking such sites is as effective as telling students they cannot drink at said bar; it will only pique a prurient interest. Second, now that the Blackberry, iPhone and other Internet-capable smartphones have become almost ubiquitous on campus, students are not limited to accessing the Web over a college broadband network; if students cannot access content on their college network, they will access it on their phone, at the local Starbucks, or while at an off-campus apartment.

Blocking may even discourage students from accessing the Web through the campus network, sending them to the more expensive, but less regulated, Internet services offered by cable, telephone and cellular companies. Finally, when a college blocks one offensive site, it had better be prepared to block all offensive sites. It is hard to justify blocking Juicy Campus (or its progeny) but not blocking Neo-nazi sites, antisemitic, racist or homophobic sites, or, in traveling down the slippery slope, political and media sites that include language offensive to some students. Free speech is so central to the experience at most colleges that a process of blocking offensive sites would quickly lead college administrators down the garden path.

The costs to students of anonymous cyber-sliming are not small. Self-harming thoughts and activities, cutting, and suicidal ideation were reported among students who were victimized on these sites. Unfortunately, when the danger and harm to students comes from outside (especially digital) sources such as anonymous gossip Web sites, there is little that a college can do. Holding colleges responsible, as Security on Campus argues, for “stop[ping] the harassment of ... students on gossip sites in cyberspace” sets up an impossible standard for colleges to meet. Even more extreme, the idea that somehow an “effective response” by a college might entail “schools shut[ting] down these sites altogether” is beyond the pale.

Colleges have no such power over Internet sites. The days of Web site operators receiving cease and desist letters from colleges and quickly deleting the content while begging for mercy are long over (to the extent they ever existed). Today's Web site operators have a healthy skepticism for legal notices, may have their own lawyers, or take the legal stance that Juicy Campus took -- Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act protects the site from liability for content created by individual users. Juicy Campus declared on its Web site that with the exception of lawful subpoenas and certain violent threats, it would not take down most posts even when contacted by college presidents.

Also discomforting is a logical extension of SOC’s expansive argument, that if a student complains about harassment on a Web site and the campus does not make heroic efforts to silence the slander, the campus would take on liability for later harm against the student, whether inflicted by another or by the student him or herself. Contrary to the widely-read SOC press release, such revolutionary change in college responsibility is best left to courts and legislatures, not to a controversial reading of an OCR letter that found no liability.

Yet courts are not likely to make such a leap. For public policy reasons, courts will often assign responsibility to the party able to prevent harm in the most efficient way. Here, colleges have no real power to prevent such harm, and assigning such responsibility would not efficiently empower colleges to protect future student victims. While, in some cases, colleges may appropriately act when threats or insults are hurled on campus by members of the college community (including when community members identifiably use cyberspace to defame other community members); colleges can do little with truly anonymous speech in cyberspace.

With the digital age in full swing, colleges must reconceptualize what it means to act in loco parentis, and how, to the extent they can do anything, they can best serve their students. The answer is not to read into OCR investigations a new era of control and responsibility. Disaggregated problems require disaggregated solutions. Colleges cannot wrap their students in bubble wrap whenever they venture outside of their comfortable residence halls, and even bubble wrap does not protect against digital slander. Rather than reasserting rights and responsibilities under in loco parentis and seeking to envelope students in a protective aura, colleges should return to their core mission and educate students on how to interact within, and protect themselves from, the dangers posed by the digital world.

Through extracurricular education, colleges can empower students to turn the tables on challenges within the digital environment and use the tools presented by the Web to their benefit. In another generation, lessons on how to balance a checkbook would help students better navigate their world. Today technology services and student affairs staff can join their professorial colleagues in educating students, concentrating on imparting lessons that help students navigate the churn and froth of the digital environment (a good example of such education is Tracy Mitrano's “Thoughts on Facebook”).

Whether it is through orientation sessions, programs and speakers spread throughout the academic year, e-mails and advice letters, or other means, colleges are in a strong position to provide a robust education on practical lessons students must learn outside of the classroom. In so doing, colleges can best empower young people to defend and protect themselves in the digital environment, both as students and later as alumni. Holding colleges responsible for policing cyberspace won't protect our students or serve their educational needs.

In part two of this series, Benjamin Bleiberg and I will lay out the framework for a set of disaggregated resources and strategies students can use when confronted by digital defamation.

As an advocate for the position that higher education benefits from studying the lessons of business and selectively implementing those ideas that help corporate and non-profit entities to prosper, I was pleased to come across Inside Higher Ed’s report on the publication of the multi-part work The Business of Higher Education (Praeger), edited by John C. Knapp and David J. Siegel. The author observed, correctly, that “many college and faculty leaders bristle at the suggestion that the institutions -- and their students -- would be better off if only institutions operated more like their counterparts in the private sector.”

That’s why I propose a model that may meet with the approval of those who think higher education is just fine ignoring business models: design thinking. For starters, it’s an idea with origins as remote from business as design itself. While their work is hardly nonprofit, designers are rarely found destroying the competition, maximizing profit margins and exploiting their employees. Few of the designers I know personally would fit the negative perception of corporate America held by many academicians. Design thinking is about helping people and organizations to solve their problems for long-term satisfaction, not achieving efficiency for short-run gains.

While it is true that more businesses are adopting design thinking as a model for achieving better results, enhanced innovation and improved service to customers, as evidenced by several new books about innovation design and design thinking targeted for the business market, the ideas behind design thinking emerged from the methods that are common to nearly all design fields, be it industrial, graphic, instructional or any other design profession. These basic operating principles constitute a process that might be expressed most simply as the way that designers approach problems and achieve solutions. Designers think of themselves as problem finders more so than problem solvers because their solutions start with a deep understanding of the problem requiring a solution.

What can design thinking offer to higher education? In a word, change. Not just change for the sake of creating change or trying the latest fad, but thoughtful change for the higher education institution that wants to position itself to better withstand the challenges presented by both old and new competitors. Change not just for technology’s sake, but change based on better understanding students and putting into a place a mechanism for institution-wide innovation. (I’ll provide some examples later.)

The seminal work on design thinking, The Art of Innovation (Currency/Doubleday, 2001) came from a business outsider, Tom Kelley, then general manager of IDEO, one of the world’s leading design firms. Those interested in learning more about design thinking are well advised to start with Kelley’s book, as it introduces the “IDEO Method,” a five-step approach to understanding how designers think. In a nutshell, the process requires its practitioners to internalize the following:

• Understand: be an empathic thinker and put yourself in the shoes of your student or whomever it is that you provide a service to.
• Observe: watch people in real-life situations to better understand how they really use a service or product and those things that both please and frustrate them.
• Visualize: brainstorm with colleagues to identify new ideas and concepts that will give those you serve or teach a better (learning) experience.
• Prototype: take time to explore multiple iterations of an idea before exposing those you serve or teach to a potential solution or enhancement.
• Implementation and Evaluation: be thoughtful about when and how to implement a new idea and invest time to evaluate its impact, and then re-design as needed

For those who need a faster introduction to design thinking, take 22 minutes to watch "The Deep Dive," an episode of “Nightline” that profiled how the staff at IDEO tackle a new problem and develop a solution. As one learns from this video, the designers at IDEO are experts in using the design thinking process to identify and approach problems and then develop elegant solutions to them. That’s how IDEO has designed everything from the mouse you use nearly every day to NASA equipment to toothpaste dispensers and microwave ovens.

As the design thinking method gained popularity, IDEO added organizational consulting to its product design business, and now works with health care and K-12 education systems on restructuring and re-engineering workflows to eliminate dysfunctional practices and improve user experiences. One recent book about design thinking, Change by Design, by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, reads more like Zen philosophy than it does a how-to for businesspeople out to rule the world.

But even those who count themselves among higher education’s anti-business faction may benefit from another new book on design thinking authored by -- shudder -- a business school dean. The Design of Business, by Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto, is a good example of a business book that even the most business-phobic humanist could enjoy reading. To be certain, there are a number of case studies profiling businesses that achieved success with design thinking, but there is still much food for thought for those who think their school or department could do better.

For example, Martin elegantly explains how businesses emerge and evolve, through a multi-stage process he describes as the “knowledge funnel.” It begins with a mystery in which the fledgling innovator seeks to build a better mousetrap, such as how to organize all the world’s information. The business creates a heuristic or an intuitive sense of how to solve the mystery that allows it to offer an initial product or service. As it moves out of the exploration stage, it develops an algorithm to operate the business so that the core solutions are efficiently exploited.

To illustrate this end stage of the knowledge funnel he points to companies like McDonald’s. What started as mostly a guess that Americans would eat fast food became a highly mechanized process that is easily replicated with great efficiency. McDonald’s has no interest in stimulating employee creativity or innovation; just keep the burgers and fries coming. But blindly adhering to algorithms can cost dearly when a competitor, like Subway, brings new thinking and imagination to the same mystery.

The problem, according to Martin, is that some organizations are operated primarily by intuition while others are rigidly controlled by algorithms. His core message is that organizations guided by design thinking achieve a balance between the two so that both intuition and algorithms merge to keep the organization searching for and solving new mysteries while avoiding the extreme exploitation that leads to obsolescence. When they “satisfice” for exploiting old ideas, businesses are ultimately confronted by upstart competitors exploring new mysteries. Thus emerge disruptive innovations offering products or services that better meet people’s needs.

It’s a cycle that endlessly repeats itself, and higher education is equally susceptible. Consider higher education’s long reign using the same delivery and organizational structures after hundreds of years. It now is pressured by new competitors, many of them for-profit businesses offering low-cost, convenient options that leverage advanced educational technologies. The new mystery is how to deliver higher education in ways that are both affordable and sustainable, and that meet the needs of a new generation of both traditional and nontraditional learners.

Are there ways in which design thinking could help America retain its place as the crown jewel of the world’s higher education system? Admittedly, higher education is a unique industry owing to the vast independence of its primary employees, the faculty. Each faculty member is in his or her own way an independent agent trusted with the responsibility to deliver learning to the students and pursue a highly individualized research agenda. Learning is not a McDonald’s hamburger that can be manufactured on demand guided by a scientific algorithm designed to assure a predetermined outcome. What faculty do in classrooms is largely guided by intuition; there is no algorithm for great teaching.

Despite the differences that distinguish colleges and universities from the corporations that Martin profiles in his book, design thinking is a potential solution by which higher education institutions could create the balance between intuitive and algorithmic methods. But to make that happen both faculty and administrators need to take a closer look at what design thinking can do for organizations.

Martin’s book offers a case study that provides a good example: the turnaround at Procter & Gamble. In 2000, when A.G. Lafley was appointed CEO, P&G had lost market leadership to newer competitors across a wide range of its consumer products. Like higher education in 2010, P&G’s expenses were soaring while Walmart and others introduced cheaper, lower quality private-label products that attracted consumers away from P&G’s more expensive branded goods. Lafley needed to boost innovation at P&G while simultaneously becoming more efficient; a blending of the intuitive and algorithmic sides of the organization.

In 2001 he appointed Claudia Kotchka to turn P&G into a design thinking organization. He invited outside designers to assist with the development of new products, a strategy not previously invoked at P&G, and by 2006 about 35 percent of P&G’s new products had origins outside the company. Perhaps the most critical change was obtaining a deeper understanding of the company’s consumers. Hair care product team members began to visit salons and homes to see how the products were actually used, and listened to the suggestions and complaints of consumers. Within three years of Lafley’s arrival P&G was achieving growth and recapturing market share in nearly every brand category.

The parallels between P&G at its weakest and the plight of many contemporary colleges and universities seem strong enough to suggest that design thinking is an idea worth considering. What might it look like to do so?

To follow the Procter & Gamble example, in higher education students endlessly evaluate courses, but what’s lacking is a committed effort to observe students as they learn and to then listen to their concerns. In a design thinking culture, faculty and administrators would empathically put themselves in the place of the students at their own institution and elsewhere to fully understand how to improve what happens in and beyond the classroom.

Consider the perplexing conundrum presented by scholarly publishing. Faculty members produce research that, in order to achieve tenure, they give away to journal publishers. Publishers, particularly in science, technology and medicine, edit and package faculty’s intellectual property and sell it back to higher education institutions at high prices that require constant increases to library budgets. Despite years of discussion about the scholarly communications crisis, we still have only partial and little used potential solutions.

The scholarly communications crisis presents what Martin would describe as a “wicked problem”, one that requires more than analytical or intuitive thinking. In his book The Opposable Mind, Martin states that when neither option A nor B works, design thinkers must create option C that blends A and B, offering a new and completely untested solution. Proposals to solve the scholarly communications crisis tend to fall into two camps: different pricing models and open access. The former attempts an analytical solution by transferring the existing system to a new price model so money changes hands differently. The latter attempts an intuitive solution by encouraging scholars to distribute their manuscripts through free (to the reader) distribution systems. Could design thinkers develop a C solution?

The design thinker would start by unraveling the real problem that fuels the crisis, which might well be the nature of the research and tenure system itself. Identifying the problem is paramount. The design thinker (or design team) would talk to all the parties involved and learn as much as possible about the scholarly communication process from the experts, both authors and publishers.

Next, the design team would bring back for analysis all the pieces of information, and process it in a brainstorming (“deep dive”) session. Out of the brainstorming would emerge prototypes for a new or modified system of scholarly communications. The design team would implement the prototypes deemed to have the most promise. The prototype that most closely approaches a “C” solution would emerge for implementation. That C solution might be some combination of a change in the tenure process and what counts as scholarship, a de-emphasis on publication in high-impact journals, an editing and publication process in which some publishers could participate, and options for self-publishing and archiving that are simpler, with clear benefits to faculty. In other words, some combination of existing practices and untested ideas that offers a completely new solution.

Design thinking is no panacea for all that ails higher education. Resolving challenges such as low retention and graduations rates, escalating textbook costs, an overdependence on adjunct faculty, lean budgets, for-profit competitors and myriad other problems will take more than a business as usual approach. However, higher education is not a business, and faculty and students will always respond caustically if they believe corporate solutions are being foisted on them by an unsympathetic administration.

This is where design thinking can make a difference. It’s more than a short-term strategy for boosting profits. It’s a roadmap for future-proofing one of society’s most valued resources. And since it involves no acquisition of or investment in sophisticated new technology, only a desire to try a new way of identifying and tackling institutional challenges, it’s right for the times. Those who want to engage with these ideas can begin with the Deep Dive video mentioned above or choose from a host of blogs written by experts in design thinking and user experience.

In 1972 Cohen, March and Olsen introduced the Garbage Can Theory of decision making as an effort to create a predictive model for how decisions are made in higher education organizations. The model describes colleges and universities as “organized anarchies” that make their decision by heaping multiple solutions into garbage cans. The detached solutions in the garbage present no utility until a problem presents itself to which one of the solutions could be attached. For too long the organized anarchy label has proven itself relatively accurate in describing what derails progress in higher education.

Design thinking, based on the premise of correctly identifying the problem before developing solutions, is as far removed from the garbage can theory as a decision making model can be. What is relatively the same since Cohen, March and Olsen devised their model is that higher education still confronts what Martin calls the “wicked problem,” a challenge that is not merely complex but is characterized by ambiguity, shifting qualities and no clear solution. Design thinking may be just what higher education needs to clean up its garbage can.

In a faraway colony, one in a thousand people -- mostly young, rich, white men -- are sent to live in isolated, rural Christian communes. Some are pious, learned, ambitious; others are unruly younger sons with no other prospects. The students spend hours every day in chapel; every few years, the entire community is seized by a several-days-long religious revival.

They also get into lots of trouble. In their meager barracks they drink, gamble, and duel. They brawl, sometimes exchanging bullets, with local residents, and bother local women. Occasionally they rebel and are expelled en masse or force administrators to resign. Overseen by low-paid clergymen too deaf or infirm to control a congregation, hazed by older students, whipped for infractions of the rules, they’re treated like young boys when their contemporaries might be married with children. And, oh yes, they spend a few hours a day in rote memorization of fewer than a dozen subjects.

This was the typical 18th century American college, loosely modeled on England’s Oxford and Cambridge, which date to the 13th century. Nine colleges were founded in the colonies before the Revolution, and they’re all still in business: Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth.

For universities, history is authority. It’s no accident that America’s most prestigious institution, Harvard, is also its oldest, or that some of the oldest organizations of any kind, worldwide, are universities.

Surveying the history of American colleges and universities with a jaundiced eye convinces me that many aspects of the current so-called crisis in higher education are actually just characteristics of the institution. It has always been socially exclusionary. It has always been of highly variable quality educationally. It has always had a tendency to expand. In fact, it is precisely because we are always asking more and more of education at all levels that its failures appear so tremendous.

Still, the United States does seem to have reached an impasse today, given escalating demand for higher education, spiraling costs, and limited resources. Unlike the 1860s and unlike the 1960s, there is little national will to grow our way out of this problem by founding more colleges or spending much more money on the ones we do have. Is this merely one more symptom of national decline? Have we hit some kind of natural limit for an educated population? Or is there a mismatch between the structures of the past and the needs of the present?

America can’t remain a global economic powerhouse while it slides to the middle of the heap in education. Nor can we grapple with the challenges we face as a global community without meeting the world’s burgeoning demand for education. Nor can college leaders get away with claiming that their hands are tied and only more taxpayer and tuition dollars can solve their problems.

There are two basic options the way I see it: fundamentally change the way higher education is delivered, or resign ourselves to never having enough of it.

The good news is that all over the world people are thinking big about how to change higher education. Brick, stone, and marble institutions with centuries of prestige behind them are increasingly being joined by upstarts, both nonprofit and for-profit, and even more loosely organized communities of educational practitioners and apprentices.

The open courseware movement started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, when the school decided to put its coursework online for free. Today, you can go online to MIT OpenCourseware and find the full syllabuses, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for 1,900 courses, nearly every one MIT offers, from physics to art history. As of March 2010, 65 million people from virtually every country on Earth have raided this trove.

Open educational content is just the beginning. Want a personalized, adaptive computer tutor to teach you math or French? A class on your iPhone that’s structured like an immersive role-playing game? An accredited bachelor’s degree, in six months, for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wikiuniversity? These all exist today, the beginnings of a complete educational remix. Do-It-Yourself University means the expansion of education beyond classroom walls: free, open-source, networked, experiential, and self-directed learning.

This opening world presents huge questions about the true nature of a college education: questions that are legitimate even when they are raised with self-interest by traditional educators.

The university is over a thousand years old, older than modernity itself. On American soil it has grown like Katamari Damacy, the Japanese video game in which a magical “clumping spirit” snowballs around the world collecting everything in its path until it attains the size of a star. The latter-day “multiversity,” as it was dubbed by the University of California president Clark Kerr in 1963, clumps teaching with research, vocational and technical education with liberal arts, sports, clubs, and parties with intellectual life, accreditation and evaluation with mentoring and friendship. For students “college” means very different things at different times: the place to grow up, be out on your own, make friends, take leadership roles, prepare for and find a good job, and even learn.

Technology upsets the traditional hierarchies and categories of education. It can put the learner at the center of the educational process. Increasingly this means students will decide what they want to learn, when, where, and with whom, and they will learn by doing. Functions that have long hung together, like research and teaching, learning and assessment, or content, skills, accreditation, and socialization, can be delivered separately.

There’s no good way to measure the benefits of the old-fashioned face-to-face educational model; there’s worry that something important will be discarded in the race ahead. More fundamentally, no one knows if it’s possible to extend the benefits of higher education to the majority of a population without diluting its essence. But those are questions that educators ought to be testing and investigating rigorously. College leaders who want to be on the right side of history won’t hold stubbornly to the four-year, classroom-hour-based “butts-in-seats, nose-to-nose, face to face” model as the only way to provide the benefits of a liberal arts education. They will innovate to meet students wherever they are, and they will reinvent assessment to provide much better transparency about what students are learning.

Here are four trends guiding this transformation, as they might look from the point of view of college leaders:

1. The 80/20 Rule. Is your institution part of the leading-edge 20 percent? How will you attract and serve the “nontraditional” student who is the new norm? Most of the growth in higher education over the next century will come from the 85 percent of students who are “nontraditional” in some way -- older, working adults, or ethnic minorities. They will increasingly attend the 80 percent of institutions that are nonselective. This includes most mainstream public universities and particularly community colleges and for-profit colleges, which saw the sharpest growth in the 2000s.

For-profit colleges are the only U.S. institutions that have both the resources and the mission to seriously expand their numbers in the foreseeable future. Community colleges already enroll half of all undergraduates. Both disproportionately enroll the demographic groups that dominate the next generation of Americans: Hispanics, all other minority groups, and first-generation college students. Some of the boldest thinking is happening in institutions that are far from the ideal of either the multiversity or the colonial “little college.” Yet, they typically lack the opportunity for undergraduates to participate in original research, not to mention many of the intangibles of college life like dorms and extracurriculars. Concerns about quality and affordability in the new mainstream of higher education have to be addressed head-on. The answer is not for established institutions to exclude the upstarts from the conversation.

2. The Great Unbundling. Which services and departments are core to your mission? Where can you partner, outsource, or pool resources across the state, the nation, or the world for greater efficiency? Universities have historically combined many social, educational, and other benefits in one-stop shopping. Increasingly, some of these resources (e.g., faculty time) are strained, while others (like written course content) are approaching a marginal cost of zero.

As it has with industries from music to news, the logic of digital technology will compel institutions to specialize and collaborate, find economies of scale and avoid duplications.

Books can be freed from the printed page, courses freed from geographical classrooms and individual faculty, and students freed from bureaucratic obstacles to transferring course credit between institutions, or designing their own courses of study.

Could any of your departments flourish on its own? Stripped-down institutions that focus on instruction or assessment only, or on a particular discipline or area, will find more and more audience. The most cutting-edge sciences and the most traditional liberal arts can both flourish in a specialized, concentrated, and technologically enhanced setting. I have seen professors elevate the craft of teaching rhetoric, composition, and critical thinking to new heights using social media and applying cutting-edge research about learning.

3. Techno-hybridization. Are distance learning decisions confined to the IT office? Are you creating online courses through a cheap, hands-off process, or are you experimenting across disciplines with the best ways to integrate online and offline experiences? How can you identify and support your internal innovators among faculty? Department of Education research shows that a blend of technology-assisted and traditional class instruction works better than either one alone. This blending can occur with institutions enrolling students on campus or off, in classrooms or online -- studies have shown that students do a better job collaborating online if they meet in person even once.

4. Personal Learning Networks and Paths. How well does your college serve the transfer, dropout, and nontraditional student? How easy do you make it for students to design their own experiences? People who graduate from high school at 18 and go straight through four years of college are already a tiny minority of all young Americans, around one in ten. Pulling America out of its educational slump requires designing programs flexible and supportive enough to reach the 44 percent of students who currently drop out of college and the 30 to 35 percent who drop out of high school. These programs have to provide socialization, personal development, and critical thinking skills, not just job training.

Self-directed learning will be increasingly important. Already, the majority of students attend more than one institution during their college careers, and more than half seek to enhance their experience with an internship. In the future, with the increasing availability of online courses and other resources, individuals will increasingly forge a personal learning path, combining classroom and online learning, work and other experiences.

The open-education pioneer Alec Couros at the University of Saskatchewan talks about assembling personal learning networks that include mentors, colleagues, media sources, books, and collections of links. The existing system will be challenged to come up with new forms of accreditation, transfer credits, and certification so that the value of this work can be recognized by potential employers and others.

Education is an essentially conservative enterprise. If we didn’t believe that one generation had something important to transmit to the next, we wouldn’t need education. So changing education makes lots of people nervous, especially school leaders whose salary comes from the old model.

Still, in an ideal world, we can agree that opportunities to stretch your abilities, test your personal mettle, follow your natural curiosity, and jam intellectually with friends, colleagues, and mentors -- all the good stuff that is supposed to happen in college -- would be more open to more people at all ages and transition points in life. Traditional colleges will continue to find plenty of eager applicants who want the experiences only they can provide.

The 80 percent of American college students who currently attend nonselective institutions will have many more options, and so will the majority of young people, those who drop out or who never apply. Alternatives to the four-year bachelor’s degree will get more visible and acceptable, which might help bridge one of the biggest social divides in American life. Tuition costs would reach sane levels due to increased use of technology, true competition, and better-allocated federal and state incentives. This would lower one of the most important barriers to educational access.

By modifying the economics of the nation’s second largest industry, we’d save money, and tap the resources and energy of a whole new generation to tackle challenges like building a greener society, expanding the middle class, creating better jobs, and providing people with health care. Whether these incipient changes will lead to that kind of positive transformation, however, still hangs in the balance.

It depends largely on whether the guardians of existing institutions embrace transformation, or let history pass them by.

As someone who researches and works with distance education consortia in both the United States and Canada, I have received several inquiries over the past week about “what really happened” in the closure of the University of Texas’s TeleCampus. Just two weeks earlier, I had met with Darcy Hardy and Rob Robinson, the leaders of the TeleCampus. They were charged last May with meeting an accelerated timetable for making their organization self-sustaining. Their efforts appeared to be bearing fruit. That was the first of several wrong conclusions drawn by me and others in recent weeks.

In this article, I raise other conclusions that were offered to me.

Is distance education dead? Commenting on Inside Higher Ed’s article announcing the closure, one observer suggested that the pursuit of distance education is driven primarily by monetary motives. He added that universities “find distance education is not infinitely scalable and scramble for some reason to drop such programs.”

It is wrong to conclude that the TeleCampus closure reflects negatively on distance education as an enterprise. Distance education enrollments continually grow faster than the on-campus population. Officials at Colorado Community Colleges Online recently told me about their 49 percent enrollment increase over the spring 2009 term. Although some would like it to do so, distance education is not going away.

Are distance learning consortiums dead? Some suggest that it no longer makes sense to have separate structures, like the TeleCampus, to support distance education. That conclusion rings hollow for me, especially since I heard about two other states considering new consortiums in the last week. In my 2008 study on financing consortiums, I harshly concluded that these multi-institution entities need to evolve or dissolve.

As technology and constituent needs change, so must consortiums. They should focus on services that the institutions cannot do on their own or for which economies of scale improve quality and costs. Consortiums can also add value by conducting research on emerging technologies and teaching techniques. Successful consortiums constantly evolve their structure to assume new roles while shedding activities once they become entrenched on campus. The Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium embraces an entrepreneurial spirit by developing e-portfolio and online tutoring services that have expanded well beyond state borders. If a consortium does not meet the evolutionary challenge, it should dissolve. Failure to evolve was never a criticism of the TeleCampus.

Are services redundant? The TeleCampus was criticized for unnecessarily mirroring services offered by the UT campuses. That conclusion does not universally hold either. Not all campuses have the same level of services. Redundancy multiplies as each campus regenerates lost services once offered centrally. Efficiencies of scale evaporate and the costs shift to the campuses. Collaboration efforts struggle mightily in meeting needs that are urgent on one campus, but absent from another. Now the campuses will be struggling to fill the void in the next few months.

Can we say the TeleCampus mission is complete? The press release announcing the closure asserts that “a new organizational support structure is appropriate as the next step in maximizing distance education opportunities for our students. The UT TeleCampus has accomplished its mission of providing this capability to our campuses.”

Again, a conclusion that is tough to substantiate. As with other consortiums, the Telecampus’s mission is to “extend the reach” of its member campuses. That strikes me as an ongoing goal and not one with a defined endpoint. While I am delighted that the UT System will continue to support its program to accelerate baccalaureate degree completion, I remain very interested in seeing what else the new centralized support structure offers.

Is UT TeleCampus one of the best distance learning consortiums? I have called the UT TeleCampus one of the leaders in the field and an exemplar for other consortiums. Upon reflection, that conclusion is wrong. Given the strength of its staff and quality of its services, it is the best. Oddly enough, Darcy Hardy learned of the closure after returning from a trip on which she was one of 20 national leaders invited to meet with a prestigious foundation.

What lessons can be drawn? Many theories on the TeleCampus closure have been offered, including those around financial, leadership and organizational dynamics. My sincere hope is that others do not draw the wrong conclusions from this experience in assessing the worth of their own consortium. Consortiums are unique entities. While general principles may apply, their value can be judged only in each unique, local environment. The local landscape contains political, financial and historical barriers and opportunities that do not translate well from place to place.

Am I saying that we cannot learn anything from this experience? No. There will be much to learn. WCET’s eLearning Consortia Common Interest Group includes leaders from many consortiums in the United States and Canada. This decision renewed efforts within the group to examine consortium success factors and to identify practices that do (or do not) work. Keep watching for developments.

In the end, why is the University of Texas System closing its TeleCampus? I remain perplexed, and I hesitate to guess, as I will probably draw the wrong conclusions.