Forecasting the Future in Higher Ed
I read a scary article from Friday's Washington Post entitled "A Virtual Revolution is Brewing for Colleges" that reinforced something I've been saying for the last 6 months. The world is changing and higher education is firmly in the crosshairs of this technological revolution. This is not a revolutionary idea, Clay Shirky, professor at NYU, predicted the coming tidal wave caused by the lowered cost of coordination and communication in his talk from the TED conference in 2005 entitled Institutions vs Collaboration saying that any institution that relies on information monopoly would be directly affected by the change in technology. Sound familiar? Higher Ed is essentially founded on a delivery of information from a group that has the information to a group that doesn't. We seem to be firmly in the crosshairs of this revolution and we should be aware of it.
So where is this all going? I don't think you can replicate the on-campus experience. I think students will continue to want the experience of living in a communal experience with their peers, termed by others as a youth-centric subculture. However, anything that does not directly affect this cultural experience is easily replicated at lower cost and with easier delivery by use of technology.
Want to live stream your class all over the world? This has become infinitely easier in the last 5 years. Want to have live real time class discussion by text? Welcome to Twitter, google documents and the coming Google Wave frame shift.
The market does seem ripe for an entrepreneur with deep enough pockets to create the campus experience and a willingness to facilitiate the cheap delivery of classes. As the article said, community colleges and for-profit schools are ALREADY working on affecting this technology.
Forecasting is a critical skill for work in our fast changing world. How the technological revolution will affect our individual jobs and our institutions is still in the works, but it seems obvious at this point that it will. Are you ready for the coming tidal wave?
This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
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