The 5 Key Components: Why Access to College-level Information Hasn’t Solved the College Cost Problem
I wrote yesterday about the paradox of higher ed — that the price for college has continued to climb, even while access to college-level information has ballooned. Many people acknowledge that there are sufficient resources to earn a degree outside of a college environment, and that the cost of college is difficult to justify. Indeed, many groups have made major efforts to disrupt this. And they have made significant progress. Consider for example, MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, Khan Academy, and iTunes U. These amazing resources offer unprecedented world-wide access to free university-level instruction. So why haven’t these impacted the price of college?
Efforts like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and Open Educational Resources (OERs) address critical parts of the core offerings of college, but not all. Colleges don’t just teach courses. In order to legitimately offer a degree and truly disrupt higher education, we must be able to replicate the core offerings of college, and retain significant competitive advantages. All degree-granting colleges have the following core offerings:
• Secure ID Verification
• Degree requirements and learning pathways aligned to other respected degree programs
• Teaching and Instruction suitable to master the requirements
• Verification of mastery
• Secure record of mastery
Recognizing these 5 key components lets us see clearly why these efforts haven’t impacted the price of college. We haven’t yet posed a challenge to the status quo — we’ve really only addressed teaching and instruction. If we can’t address all 5, the circuit remains open; we are still dependent on the same institutions for one or more critical piece for a degree and still subject to their same practices and behavior.
These institutional dependencies have to date blocked efforts to disrupt the stranglehold of these institutions over students and the college marketplace. And there is your answer why access to information hasn’t impacted the cost of college — yet.
What do you think? Please let me know in the comments. Or connect with me on Twitter, My site, LinkedIn, or reach me at: ben@teachur.co.
