Why the Georgia Tech-Udacity tie up is a big deal

When the news broke last week that Georgia Tech had reached an agreement with Udacity and AT&T to offer a Master of Science degree in computer science for just USD7000, this must have sent shivers down the spines of university Vice-Chancellors and Presidents all around the world.

If it did not, it should of done. Currently ranked 24th in the world for computer science, Georgia Institute of Technology is certainly no slouch. Throw a Fortune 500 company like AT&T into the mix, and the hip, new delivery platform provided by Udacity and you have a potent combination.

George Siemens (@gsiemens) simply tweeted: ‘OK, this is significant’ with a link to the Udacity blog and Sebastian Thrun’s statement about the deal. It is significant if Siemens says its significant given he was one of the architects of the original MOOC concept back in 2008, albeit when it was a very different beast to the one today. Siemens and his collaborators (the so-called cMOOC group) are critical of the private equity led xMOOC model because of its behaviourist — as opposed to connectivist — educational philosophy. I happen to agree with these criticisms but this is of little relevance right now, given this latest development, because the academic debate about the merits of one learning theory or another take second place to economics and what consumers of higher education perceive to be value for money. In terms of the chart above (courtesy of Phil Hill), it seems at least two of the problems faced by the xMOOCS have just been fixed; viz. credentialing and a revenue stream.

So now we have a MOC. It’s a massive course, and it’s online, but it’s not open — at least not if you want the credential of a Georgia Tech degree. The reason this is such a big deal is that — putting the pedagogical debate to one side — given the awarding body is a globally highly ranked university, the rational consumer sees value for money;  i.e. high quality at a lower cost. The potential impact on universities offering traditional masters degrees in computer science is huge.

The first xMOOC was a computer science course, and since then, just about every discipline has been ‘MOOCified’ in some shape or form. I would anticipate that it will not be too long before a top ranking business school partners with one of the private MOOC providers and offers an MBA for a similar price.

The business models of universities must change and change fast if they are to withstand this upheaval.

Why MOOCs matter

Amid all the hoo-har about MOOCs and the will-they won’t-they debate over their impact on university business models, a piece by Tom Friedman caught my eye the other day on the rise of the ‘celebrity professor’. The stimulus for the Friedman article was a conference he attended last week hosted by Harvard University and MIT where academics and administrators from these two elite US universities discussed the rise of online courses and the ramifications for residential colleges and universities. One outcome, as Inside Higher Ed reports, is that MOOCs are certainly prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before.

Friedman notes that not every academic is likely to generate a rock-star following following their entry into MOOCdom, but he issues a grave warning to the rest us mere mortal when he states:

‘The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor … When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.’

This is why MOOCs matter. I presented at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I was asked for my advice by a member of the audience on how she might go about dealing with a group of recalcitrant academics in her department who are steadfastly refusing to do anything online. My response was that, pretty soon, it may not be a decision that they get to make. As Friedman notes in his article, Harvard Business School no longer teaches entry-level accounting because there is a professor at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course is so good that Harvard students use that instead.

Mainstreaming the disruption

This slide deck I presented at a senior leadership conference at Griffith University last week.

The essence of my argument is that the higher education sector is entering a perfect storm with the problems of student indebtedness, budget deficits and graduate unemployment looming large, combining with the disruptive innovation from the non-university private sector providing what appear to be viable alternatives to a traditional university education.

The solution, I believe, is to ‘mainstream the disruption’. To sit back and continue with business as usual would be a courageous decision (to borrow from Sir Humphrey Appleby).

RevolutiOnline.edu

There was a star-studded round table session at the World Economic Forum at Davos last week entitled ‘RevolutiOnline.edu: Online Education Changing the World’. The session was moderated by Thomas Friedman, and the speakers included Larry Summers (former Harvard President), Bill Gates, Peter Theil (Founder’s Fund), Rafael Reif (MIT President), Sebastian Thrun (Udacity), Daphne Koller (Coursera), and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has been taking MOOCs.

The video recording runs for 68 minutes which is longer than the average attention span these days, but it is pretty compelling viewing.

Highlights for me included:

• the whole of Friedman’s interview with 12-year old Khadijah Niazi, which illustrated quite vividly how revolutionary and far-reaching the open education movement can be (the first 15 minutes or so);
• the Larry Summer’s quote (borrowed from Rudi Dornbusch) that “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you think they could” (applied to online learning) (24:30);
• the comments from Peter Theil about why students are not getting value for money in education and how this is serving to drive the disruption in the higher education space (from 30:33 to 35:00); and
• the remarks made by Bill Gates about peer-to-peer interaction and why online learning is working now when it hasn’t in the past (40:50), and the question of the ‘credential’ (41:45 to 42:05) and how, in the past, it was where you went and how long you spent there, compared with now where it is about proof you have the knowledge, independent of how you acquired it.

The comments made by Theil and Gates have consequences for all universities. Put simply, the economics of higher education has changed, and as a recent  Moody’s report highlights, not even the Ivy League is safe. The business model has to change, and those that refuse (or are slow) to change may find themselves out of business.

The embedded biases within the LMS and the impact on learning

After almost a decade away in the corporate world, I don’t think I could have picked a better time to return to mainstream academia. Universities are changing — largely because of external pressures it must be said — and I can sense an openness to new thinking about pedagogy that wasn’t in evidence before. A key driver, I think, is the ubiquity of technology.

Whether we are talking about desktops, laptops, tablets or hand-helds, access to ICTs is no longer strictly the realm of the geek. Walk into any classroom in a university these days and its like a technology park. The big question, of course, is the extent to which all this hardware is actually serving to enhance learning.

Perusing a Big Think piece the other day, I got to thinking about how relatively little debate there is in academic circles about the limiting effects of the proprietary learning management system (LMS). This has been a bugbear of mine for some time, but reading about the observations of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (author of Program or Be Programmed), has provided me with greater clarity on this issue.

Rushkoff notes that people tend to think of technologies as being neutral and it is only their use that determines their impact. For instance, he points out that guns don’t kill people, people do. People can also use pillows to kill people through suffocation. Guns, however, are much more biased toward killing people than pillows. Similarly, educational technologies come with their embedded biases, and some will be more biased towards deeper learning than others.

Herein lies the problem in the way the LMS is typically employed in universities. Far too often, the platform serves as little more than a receptacle for the storage of PowerPoint files, and when there is some capacity for interaction, it takes place within the confines of a clunky threaded discussion forum where the user experience bears little resemblance to that of the popular social media platforms used routinely by learners in their private lives. The net result is that creativity is stifled, engagement is lower, and learning is constrained.

As academics, we are far too accepting of the LMS. It must be OK because the university has just upgraded to the latest version. The reality, however, is that outside the walls of the proprietary system, people are unshackled and free to curate, connect and create. This is what it means to be literate in the digital age, and while individuals will develop these so-called 21st skills despite the rigidities of the formal education system, if there were a genuine commitment to a learner-centric, participatory pedagogy, in which an individual had more control over how they learn, the returns to society on education dollars spent would be much greater.

As Clay Johnson has acknowledged, the role of software developers is becoming increasingly important. In the context of higher education, how this will play out will depend very much on whether universities can free themselves of the lock-in they are experiencing with the likes of Blackboard. Instructure’s Canvas is, without question, a serious challenge to this monopoly power, and its open, outward-facing platform is a very exciting development because, among other things, it effectively allows the student to engage via the social media platform of their choice.