Technology and the Disruption of Higher Education

Henry C Lucas Jr

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9789813144323
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Universities for years have been the bright spot in our educational system. Today, these institutions are under siege from multiple constituencies including students, parents, legislators, government officials and their own faculties. Education has historically been a way for students to improve their lives and fortunes. However, the rising costs of college are a barrier to access for many students, reducing their chances for upward mobility.

Is technology the solution, or is it just another costly problem for universities? The purpose of this book is to explore how new technology has the potential to transform higher education. However, this same technology also has the potential to disrupt universities. Much depends on how administrators, faculty and students apply technologically enhanced learning.

Technology and the Disruption of Higher Education presents details on MOOCs, blended, flipped and online classes and their role in transforming higher education based on the author's experiences teaching all of these types of courses. These technology-enabled approaches to teaching and learning offer tremendous opportunities to schools, but they also threaten the traditional university. The book identifies some of these threats and opportunities and offers suggested strategies to take advantage of the technology.

Is this technology enough to save the university system? While new ways of teaching and learning are exciting, they are only part of the puzzle. Radical change beyond what happens in the classroom is needed if our higher education system is to continue to flourish and some of these ideas are discussed in the last chapter of the book. The book is a call to action for educators to realize that the technology is both transformational and disruptive, and that some universities are going to fail in the next 15 years.

Contents:

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• On the Nature of the University:
  • Introduction
  • What Is a College Education All About?
  • Why a Revolution?
• Technology-Enhanced Learning:
  • Changing the Way We Teach
  • Blending and Flipping
  • A High-Quality Online MBA Program
  • The MOOC Movement
• Disrupting and Transforming the University:
  • Deploying the Technology
  • Opportunities and Threats
  • Cost and Quality
  • A Vision for the Future
  • The Art of Survival
  • Changing the System
• References
• Appendix

Readership: Students, teaching professionals and policymakers who are keen to understand the impact of technology on higher education.

Part I: On the Nature of the University

Chapter 1 introduces the three main themes of the book and describes the nature of the transformations and disruptions affecting higher education today. It discusses the challenges schools face and introduces three types of technology-enhanced teaching and learning. The chapter presents some statistics about the state of U.S. universities and asks the question, why do students go to college? This chapter also addresses some of the criticisms of higher education, especially the issues of what students are learning and the costs of college.

Chapter 2 explores the question of what college is all about. It argues that one of the major purposes of a college education is to prepare students to think critically about important issues. The chapter explores the nature of critical thinking and how it can be assessed. Technology-enhanced teaching contributes to the development of students’ critical-thinking skills insofar as it encourages active rather than passive learning and puts more responsibility for learning on the student. The chapter discusses the problems with lecturing and suggests that colleges should espouse the goal of reducing or eliminating the lecture altogether. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the problems inherent in trying to assess the outcomes of a course or a program.

Chapter 3 asks why there is a revolution occurring in higher education today. It focuses on the relationship between the quality of instruction and the cost of instruction. An objective of new teaching approaches should be to maintain or increase quality as a first priority, with cost being a secondary consideration. But college costs are a major issue today, and the chapter discusses both costs and financial aid, which reduces the sticker price of college for many students.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Technology-enhanced teaching and learning are both transformational and disruptive to universities. American universities have many great qualities, but a fast response to crisis is not one of them. Schools have ignored these technologies or minimized their possible impact at great peril. As a result, some colleges are going to fail, and others will experience declining quality in applicants and in the faculty attracted to their campuses.

Technology-enhanced teaching and learning can transform the university by providing better quality instruction, expanding the geographic reach of the university, and enhancing its reputation. However, a school must explore and adopt these technologies, technologies that essentially change the way instruction has taken place for hundreds of years. While a certain apprehension in understandable, schools that ultimately fail to recognize and embrace these opportunities or are not able to bring about such massive change will find the technologies to be highly disruptive.

Although not a popular topic of conversation, universities are extremely competitive with one another, and not just on the athletic field. Universities compete for the best students, the best faculty, the best research, and the most funding. In the contemporary academic landscape, the university that successfully adopts these new technologies and changes the way it does business will have a competitive advantage over schools that defend the status quo.

There is more to the university than instruction, and it is unlikely that these new technologies alone will save the American university. If they are not enough, what additional steps are required? How will incumbent schools compete with one another and with start-up colleges that use technology to create a much lower cost structure than the incumbents? The book explores some radical steps that American universities will need to take to remain vital and competitive as this century progresses.

Part I of this book explores the nature of the university and describes some of the key challenges facing American higher education today to motivate the discussion of technology-enhanced teaching and learning in the second part of the book. Part II then explains what these technologies are and how they work in greater detail. What does a blended class look like? Why would a school offer an online degree program, and how can such a program be structured? Why is there so much excitement about MOOCs, and how do they fit into the curriculum at the university level? I draw from and present examples of courses I have taught, including blended classes, online classes, and a MOOC, and evaluate them from the perspective of both personal experience and the experiences of others.

These new applications of technology provide students with greater flexibility. More important, they make it possible to change the way we teach and students learn. Successful blended courses, high-quality online programs, and MOOCs place more of the responsibility for learning on students, which encourages them to think critically about the issues being taught in courses. These new approaches remove much of the routine and tedium of lengthy, in-person lectures and encourage faculty to discuss issues with students in a more active learning environment rather than the more passive mode of lectures. The talents of the faculty are put to better use by discussing ideas and stimulating student thinking rather than simply talking at students.

Part III of the book discusses the opportunities and threats from technology-enhanced learning. This section describes how schools can take advantage of technology to improve the quality of their programs and to better serve students. It also points out how these technologies can pose threats to schools that ignore them, either because they deny their importance or because they lack the resources to respond to the threat. Technology-enhanced learning is not enough to save the American university; certainly, more is needed. To this point, the last chapter of the book discusses major reforms in higher education and suggests strategies for different types of schools to follow given the massive changes underway in education today.

Themes

There are three major themes that appear throughout this book. The first is that existing technology makes it possible to change the way faculty members teach and the way students learn. The technology has the power to transform the learning process so that students are more actively involved in their education rather than passively watching an instructor lecture. The second theme is that this technology will prove transformational for universities that adopt it and disruptive for those that resist. Third, while this technology offers considerable potential, it is not sufficient to save the American university; additional radical changes are needed in higher education if it is to continue its vital role in society.

The Challenges

American universities are facing unprecedented challenges:

• There is universal agreement that college costs too much.

• State legislatures continue to cut the budgets of public universities.

• Selective private schools are perceived as becoming more elitist; some have acceptance rates in the 5%–6% range.

• Faculty members bemoan the increasing number of non-tenured and non-tenure-track instructors who are paid less and who can be terminated at will.

• Others critique the fact that growth in the number of faculty members pales compared with the growth of administrative staff.

• New technologies offer ways to change how the faculty teaches and how students learn, but schools lack a sense of urgency in adopting these technologies.

This book is about the last challenge—namely, new kinds of technologies that are disrupting the American university. Unfortunately, the focus on the cost of college, though an important issue, is distracting university administrators from the more serious challenge of adopting transformational technologies. If college leaders fail to recognize the potential of technology-enhanced learning, it will prove disruptive to their institutions, and we will witness a significant number of colleges failing over the next twenty years.

Technology-Enhanced Learning

Exhibit 1-1 is a painting of a classroom from the 1350s; there is little difference between this scene and the college classroom of today. An instructor stands at the front of the class lecturing to a group of students (note the student in the last row who is sound asleep). What has changed today? Well, most of us do not wear hot, uncomfortable robes when teaching. Technology has progressed from the blackboard to handwritten transparencies to PowerPoint presentations. The Internet makes a huge amount of information available to faculty and students, which facilitates research and writing. But fundamentally, there is an instructor in charge of ensuring that a group of students learns about a topic.

Exhibit 1-1: Representation of a University Class 1350s

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_European_research_universities)

Technology-enhanced learning has taken on several different formats. Four predominant models include the flipped classroom, the blended class, the online class, and the massive open online course (MOOC):

The Flipped Classroom

In a flipped classroom, students view lessons the instructor used to provide in front of a class on videos at home. In-person class time is then devoted to discussion and problem solving. The traditional approach of a lecture in class followed by homework outside the class is “flipped.” This approach to teaching is associated with the curriculum of the Khan Academy and K–12 instruction.

Salman Khan was an investment banker when his niece asked him for help in math. He created a few videos in which he drew on a tablet computer and narrated the video. Others found out about the videos and wanted to watch. Eventually, Khan quit his day job and devoted himself full time to developing videos in various topic areas. The Khan Academy has received foundation support, and a number of school systems have adopted these videos as a part of their regular curriculum. I discuss the Khan Academy in more detail in the next chapter.

As in other forms of technology-enhanced learning, the role of the instructor changes. Instead of lecturing, the teacher works with individual students to help them learn how to solve problems in a math course. There have been early reports of students who have learned the material quickly and, in turn, have helped other classmates with their problems. The flipped classroom, then, is not just a matter of watching videos outside of class; it involves changing the teaching and learning process.

The Blended Class

A blended class is similar to a flipped class, except the synchronous meeting (the traditional class meeting) is shortened to make up for the time that students spend outside of class watching videos and exploring other material (the asynchronous part of class). The flipped class works well in K–12, in which there are relatively short class periods, though many schools are blending courses as well as flipping them. It is estimated that more than three million K–12 students took an online course in 2009, with most of the growth in blended courses (Horn and Staker, 2011). By 2013, at least twenty-four states and Washington DC had blended schools (Watson et al., 2013). One of the major reasons given for flipping and blending in K–12 schools is that it provides an opportunity for more personalized instruction.

The blended model is also popular in colleges; for example, my full-time MBA class is scheduled to last one hour and fifty minutes. The blended version (which is all that I teach now) lasts about seventy-five minutes. There is no rule for how much to reduce the synchronous class in blending, but a reduction of 25%–50% seems to be a good range. Class time is then devoted primarily to discussion and problem solving.

Among many educators who have taught blended classes, there is a growing consensus that it is the best alternative. Why might this be the case? First, an instructor has to agree that the live lecture, if not dead, is dying out. Lectures are not a very efficient way to transmit information, especially in a large class in which there is little time for questions. Later in the book, I discuss how video lectures that replace the live lecture are much different; they are not simply a video of a faculty member standing at a lectern delivering a lecture. The synchronous class session, with its emphasis on discussion, is designed to help students learn how to think about and solve problems. A faculty member is much more valuable in this kind of coaching role rather than lecturing to a group of passive students.

Students need to acquire critical-thinking skills, which is arguably the most important outcome of a college education. Society is changing too rapidly and facts are available to anyone with an Internet connection, so simply teaching today’s facts does not necessarily prepare students for the future. Students need to learn how to think critically, so they can successfully negotiate opportunities and threats that we cannot envision today.

The Online Class

What is new about teaching online? After all, online classes have been around for years now. There are two technological advances that are combining to change the nature of online education and bring it much closer to the traditional classroom experience. The first of these is the increasing bandwidth and availability of the Internet. The second is the software that enables interactive classrooms. In today’s online class, students and faculty can each appear in live video windows and have full audio communication. The online class can simultaneously share and view documents together. Several programs for online classes even allow the instructor to set up virtual breakout rooms so that small groups can work together.

Older forms of online teaching suffered from two seri...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: On the Nature of the University
• Part II: Technology-Enhanced Learning
• Part III: Disrupting and Transforming the University
• References
• Appendix