I’m at a sxsw panel on universities. The speakers are Glenn Platt from Miami University Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies and Peg Faimon from Miami University Design Collaborative.
Tenure is a big problem. Imagine trying to run an organization where anyone who has been there for six years gets to stay forever and you can’t fire them. “Change comes funeral by funeral.”
K-12 is accelerating. Many things that used to be taught in college are being taught in high school and even middle school. Florida has a “senior to sophomore” program, where seniors can get credit for their freshman year at college during their senior year of high school.
Students and especially parents are beginning to have a consumer mindset. They have many choices for schools and programs and a lot of data available to them, which changes the amount of marketing that universities have to do.
The open courseware movement is one part of the attempt at that marketing. Open up courses to the general public, and you will get notoriety among parents and students. Stanford has their courses on itunes. As more apps come online for mobile phones, we are seeing more and more educational apps, which are currently being evaluated and rated by everyone who uses them, which crowdsources the task of finding the really good ones.
Google books, Wikipedia, and blogs are starting to disrupt the textbook industry. Professors understand the textbook problem, and they are likely to send their students to the internet to acquire information that used to require the purchase of a textbook.
Students are starting to share notes online and vote for who takes the best notes and reward them with points or even money.
There are now entire universities that are exclusively online. Business and computer science degrees are the most common. Because of the low cost for implementation, tuition is around $100.
University of Phoenix has 150,000 MBAs studying with them right now. The largest meatspace university programs only have a few hundred. These degrees are taken seriously in the job market.
Professors have begun to become experience designers, who have the opportunity to leverage the internet while also meeting in a classroom. Student success is the ultimate goal. Having a degree is not enough to assure success. They need to have experience blogging. They need to have a substantial professional web presence. They need to be able to speak publicly in succinct, ignite-style format, and in long-form keynote-style format.
Universities are starting to work together so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Some universities are starting to have exchange programs with other universities in different areas of business, silicon valley, hollywood, manhattan, etc.
Bennington has gotten rid of their departments. They are focusing instead on questions. What do we do about water? The university is structured into teams of people with different skills working together, rather than departments which become echo chambers of people with all the same skills constantly working together. The “question” model is much more similar to the workplace environment.
