What Does Digital Disruption Mean for Education and Learning? Part 3
In our first installment on education, we discussed the impact of digital technology on the limitation of place. However, the ultimate impact of digital technologies on the practice of education promises to be much broader and deeper in the course of its development. Right now, we can identify three major challenges that innovators in digital education are seeking to surmount.
Three Challenges
The first of the three is the challenge with which we began. We can label it the challenge of distance (and the associated element of time). In the US, for-profit providers such as the University of Phoenix and non-profit providers such as Southern New Hampshire University and Liberty University have become leaders with regard to overcoming the challenge of distance.
All three (and many others) are well-known for filling section after section of courses in a wide variety of subjects with learners from all over the world. Students are able to take their loan money and federal aid, enroll with a provider of online education, and then take courses from home during the times of day that suit them best. The institutions that have become leaders in this area have racked up impressive enrollment numbers largely because the barriers to entry on the part of students are much lower than with traditional education. Some of these providers have been criticized for signing up large numbers of students but failing to graduate them.
The big distance providers have generated gigantic revenues. The University of Phoenix was able to procure naming rights for the professional football stadium where the Super Bowl was played some years ago. Liberty University (on the strength of something like a billion dollars in online tuition) has been able to embark upon a massive building campaign and has gone from mere survival to financial bounty on the strength of their programs that boast nearly 90,000 online students.
The second big challenge has been to defeat problems of scale. Although online education of the more traditional sort has successfully improved access substantially, it has not really conquered the problem of high costs in education. When the former Google inventor/Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun offered a course in artificial intelligence online to an initial audience of over 100,000 people, many perceived an opportunity to bend the cost curve of higher education by achieving real economies of scale.
Those economies had thus far eluded universities thanks to what William Baumol calls “the cost disease.” Activities such as health care and higher education have been believed to be doomed to rising costs because of the difficulty in scaling them. The scaling problem results from the human intensive nature of the activities. There are limits to how many students a professor can teach. But Thrun’s spark suggested the possibility of a benign explosion. Perhaps education could be done at scale. If so, it would be possible to allow everyone to potentially learn from the world’s greatest professors at a much lower cost thanks to scaling.
Thrun and a group of venture capitalists quickly launched Udacity, which hoped to begin the MOOC (massive open online course) revolution. 2012, accordingly, became “the year of the MOOC” in the media. Predictions, including those made by Thrun, were full of the language of revolution. Thrun left Stanford (arguably among the greatest traditional universities in the world) and suggested that disruptive IT might leave the planet with less than ten major schools doing almost all the work of higher education.
In conversations at coffee houses professors speculated as to whether there might be no more than five to ten academics needed to offer courses in a particular discipline. The MOOC appeared in that moment to be an unstoppable force. As we will see, however, the revolution has been postponed. MOOCs remain full of promise, but there are a number of reasons to temper hopes. The bottom line is a simple one. If a superstar professor can teach 100,000 rather than 200 or less, it’s clear that the price of learning can be radically reduced.
The third big challenge is one that has not yet been recognized or addressed by most casual observers of the digital education phenomenon. Providers such as University of Phoenix and Liberty University essentially replicate the classroom experience many times over using technology to conquer various barriers to entry. MOOC players plan to conquer the standard barriers and price, as well, through scaling. In essence, however, whether we are talking about a simple online course or a more ambitious MOOC (imagine Michael Sandel’s Justice course for thousands), we are still talking about a college course as we know it. There may be some minor variations with regard to length of time and content, but we would still recognize the course as the type of thing we participated in ourselves. The type of thing we understand has simply been somewhat depersonalized and made available via digital technology. The third challenge is fundamentally transforming the way we educate.
The word “peripatetic” refers to those philosophers who walked as they talked. Learning that takes place in that sort of fashion might be considered significantly different from what we do now. Or how about the one room schoolhouse in which several different age groups simultaneously labor on a variety of assignments that may or may not be organized around a single theme? There’s a Montessori model that allows students a greater role in choosing what and how they would like to explore. We sometimes hear about “unschooling” approaches in the homeschooling movement. We might also consider various forms of apprenticeship that still exist in trades and continue on informally in professional settings. But still, the straightforward classroom dynamic with the professor and text as the focal points is the dominant paradigm in the modern world. Is there something about the new technology that causes us to look at education with fresh eyes and to see new possibilities? Are there some fundamentally different ways of achieving our educational goals that we have failed to consider until now?
The first acknowledged MOOC provides an example of fundamental transformation of education made possible by technology. Contrary to popular perception, the first MOOC wasn’t launched by some Silicon Valley wunderkind or by far-seeing venture capitalists. The first MOOC didn’t even come out of the United States.
If we want to simultaneously consider the first MOOC and a much bolder experiment in education than the one launched by Thrun and others, we can look to a course taught by Stephen Downes and George Siemens for the University of Manitoba in 2008. That course, “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” had about 25 standard tuition-paying students and another 2300 or so students from the general public. Downes’ and Siemens’ course proceeded in a different way from the courses with which we are familiar.
In fact, MOOCs divide according to their method (the cMOOC) and the one employed by most practitioners, such as Thrun and others (the xMOOC). The xMOOCs are just college classes scaled up to gigantic size online. On the other hand, cMOOCs employ learning theory based on connectivism. The Canadian professors constructed their class in such a way as to put lots of content online in the form of RSS feeds. Students could then interact with the content, the professors, and each other in an unstructured way using a wide variety of methods. Their method translates the usual classroom scenario in a way that appears to have promise.
The point of highlighting the cMOOC is not to uphold it as the great example of the revolution in digital education, but rather to hint at the potential size of changes that could occur thanks to disruptive technology. Traditional methods have proven value, but they will increasingly be compared against other possibilities. It is likely that different kinds of students with varying goals will prefer some methodologies and contexts to others. Education is likely to become a much more wide-open affair.
Having set out the three major camps of participants in the digital revolution (and the corresponding challenges they seek to conquer) within higher education, it’s important to add that the lines can easily be drawn too sharply. Those who compete in either the standard online course space or the xMOOC space are likely to be experimenting with significant changes that might be large enough to consider as fundamental changes in the way education is offered.
An example that comes to mind is the Heroes course offered by HarvardX. While we might tend to think of Heroes X as a more typical MOOC effort because it is based on a longstanding class at Harvard by that name, the team behind the course has employed some new approaches designed to exert a stronger pull on the learner. For example, the professor tends to deliver course content through choreographed conversations with others who play roles in a way that actors do. If the choreography is good, the student may experience the conversation as spontaneous and far superior to a normal lecture.
We might also consider the Minerva Project and Singularity University as a step in the direction of the transformation of education. Minerva’s plan is to recruit Ivy League level students to follow their unorthodox curriculum in cities around the world. Students begin their first year in San Francisco and move around to dormitories in other global venues. In theory, they could receive instruction via their laptops from some of the greatest professors in the world. This effort would combine interesting elements of place, teachers, and texts in new and potentially exciting ways. Singularity University is a global community using exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges. Its learning platform empowers individuals and organizations with the mindset, skillset, and network to build breakthrough solutions that leverage emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and digital biology.
Finally, though surely not comprehensively, there are experiments happening that involve the use of avatars. DeVry University has a nursing subdivision (Chamberlain) that is working to educate nurses and to teach some skills via the use of Second Life simulations. LibertasU is using avatars to create an environment in which students can virtually participate in discussion with famous lecturers. Such an approach may eliminate some of the problems of passivity that can accompany virtual content delivery.
