“Why do they always build the highway, re-pave the road, put in the new shopping mall,” my wife asked me a few years ago as drove a U-Haul to a new city or apartment, “AFTER we decide to move away?” It’s a question that makes me wonder anew about how the benefits always seem to come after they are needed. Of course, it’s pure luck or poor planning on our part. This may be true when it comes to getting a quality higher education for my children.

As I consider the decreasing value of my house, how much the economic downturn took out–if not completely wiped out–college savings plans for children to attend college, I can only pray that by the time my kids are ready to go to college, that progressive universities will have adopted online learning models that rely on free textbooks and open content, that “rein-in” college costs, as suggested in the article below.

• Reining in College Costs – BusinessWeek

  • Reining in College Costs

    Higher-education costs are spiraling out of control, and quality leaves much to be desired. The surprising solution, argues a college president: online learning

  • Too many students graduate with staggering debt, leading many to avoid critical but low-income careers. The cost of attendance has discouraged many students from groups typically underrepresented in higher education from even thinking about going to college. In a global economy that is increasingly knowledge-based, reduced access to higher education is a problem because of its potential impact on economic growth and on the social and cultural well-being of this country.

  • In national surveys, employers say that too many college graduates lack the skills they need to be successful in the rapidly changing workplace. Groups such as the Business-Higher Education Forum and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills point out that there is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and those they will need in the communities and workplaces of the 21st century.

  • employers point out that our primary method of “certifying” the competence of our graduates—a transcript—is not seen as a meaningful measure of their skills and abilities as potential employees.

  • The problem is that conventional wisdom in academia posits a direct relationship between cost and quality.

  • Three-year degrees, no-frills programs, and online learning can also reduce costs. But all of these measures are seen as threats to quality.

  • There is no way to break the link between cost and quality when quality is defined only by those things that require substantial resources.

  • Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman suggests that we would be able to break the link between cost and quality if we measured quality in terms of performance outcomes. They found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high-impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.”

  • online learning is proving to be a classic example of a disruptive technology.

  • disruptive technologies are innovations that transform expensive, complicated products and services into ones that are so affordable, convenient, and simple that many more people can own and use them. Christensen’s research reveals that disruptive innovations always start at the bottom of their markets, picking off simple applications first. He writes, “They then move relentlessly upmarket, becoming progressively more capable of doing sophisticated things, until they completely displace the companies that formerly had dominated their industries. For example, online advertising and news distribution have disrupted print newspapers, and wireless phones have disrupted landline telecommunications.”

  • More than 200 institutions in 32 countries have posted courses online at the Open Courseware Consortium. Many of these courses are enhanced with multimedia features and interaction elements such as social networking technologies, contextually rich simulations and animations, and electronic gaming. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University is putting together teams of content experts, learning scientists, and software engineers to develop online courseware they intend to freely distribute. Built on up-to-date research on how people learn, such courseware holds enormous promise for improving student learning outcomes, particularly as we think about the challenge of educating the latest generation of young people who have spent all of their lives plugged into a wide variety of digital technologies.

  • Competency-based models provide a way for students to learn at their own pace, some demonstrating required competencies and moving ahead much more rapidly or slowly, as the case might be, than they could in a course-based system. Problem- and project-based learning takes us a step further by moving beyond a focus on how much students know about a particular subject to a focus on what they can do with what they know. And now a student’s demonstration of what they have learned can be captured in an e-portfolio—a far more revealing record of achievement than the traditional transcript.

  • The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio, that mirror core activities in the business world. To complete each project successfully, students must acquire and apply specific competencies—the knowledge and skills necessary to function effectively in a modern business. The list of competencies also includes those things that employers tell us they are looking for: critical and creative thinking, writing and speaking, leadership and teamwork, global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. Students acquire the competencies by accessing a rich repository of multimedia learning activities that our faculty have compiled and made available online. Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects, and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction.

  • online learning materials supplemented with direct faculty-student interaction can be a powerful combination. This was confirmed by a report recently released by the U.S. Education Dept. that presented the results of a meta-analysis conducted on more than 1,000 empirical studies of online learning. The analysis showed that instruction combining online and face-to-face elements (called hybrid or blended learning) was more effective than either purely face-to-face instruction or purely online instruction. In short, the report documented that high tech plus high touch works best.

  • Ultimately, it is not the technology but the new practices that the technology enables which will revolutionize learning. These new practices entail a shift in attention away from what is taught (the “teaching” paradigm) to what and how a student learns (the “learning” paradigm). What are the critical differences?

  • In the “learning” paradigm, the teacher is not the expert provider of knowledge, but rather a guide who first specifies what students are expected to learn and then lays out pathways they can follow to meet the learning goals. The teacher becomes a supporter, a collaborator, and a coach for students as they learn to evaluate and gather information, test ideas, and explore their application to different issues and problems. Students begin to learn how to develop and pose their own questions and to explore alternative ways of finding and framing answers. So instead of working only to master the subject matter of a course, students are developing the skills to learn on their own. They no longer wait to be taught—they come to realize that, if they are to succeed, they must take a good deal of responsibility for their own learning.

  • Since technology can provide students with access to more and better learning resources than they could ever get from a lecture, faculty can let go of the full weight of being the “subject matter expert.” Freed from the burden of being the sole source of subject-specific information, they can function as learning guides, facilitators, and mentors, placing more emphasis on helping students master those critical intellectual skills and attributes that transcend academic disciplines. And once released from the responsibility to deliver all of the content, faculty can work effectively with more students, thus reducing the cost of the learning experience and increasing its quality.

  • Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation

  • He writes, “Higher education is unprepared for a global information economy. …

  • competitors are already taking advantage of the gap between our students’ extensive use of digital learning technologies and our institutions’ continuing reliance on traditional methods of teaching and learning.”

  • online learning models will ultimately transform higher education into an enterprise that is much more affordable, convenient, and effective and that many more people will have access to it than ever before. He also claims that these new models will ultimately topple many of the universities that today seem to be so unassailable.

  • heed the wisdom of Charles Darwin, who wrote, “It is not the strongest of species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.