EDUCAUSE | Future of Higher Education

Exploring and Designing Breakthrough Models in Higher Education

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:09:47 +0000

The shifting forces challenging higher education, both within and outside the academy, have dominated countless newspaper headlines and led to a flurry of new books and research discussing trends and suggesting a new future for higher education. Most agree that the landscape is changing, but what does this mean for your institution? And what can institutions do to ensure they serve the needs of their students, now and in the future? In the midst of the “big squeeze” on finances, how do institutions contain costs while providing better service and ensuring greater student success?

This toolkit will take you through the basic steps to prepare and customize the content needed for a campus-based program event using EDUCAUSE resources—video, readings, and discussion guides. The intent is to engage faculty, staff, and administrators in thoughtful dialogue and ideation about a new future at your institution.

Using this program, participants will be challenged to explore the questions listed above and to consider the forces for change within higher education and how individual institutions can leverage technology to rethink the model. Specifically, after participating in this campus event, participants should be able to:

Articulate and explain the key challenges facing the current higher education model.
Describe how information technology might make learning more personal and more efficient for today’s learners while addressing the 21st-century challenges they face.
Describe how information technology might help institutions rethink the current business model for higher education.
Demonstrate what new models might look like by developing a new course or program prototype.

Winds of Change: Higher Productivity in Higher Education

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:57:09 +0000

Editor’s Note: In this post, Brandt Redd suggests that personalized learning approaches can address dual pressures on higher education: increasing societal needs and expectations and flat or declining funding. Brandt is Senior Technology Officer for Education Programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He writes regularly at ofthat.com. This post originally appeared on the NGLC blog at nextgenlearning.org on February 11, 2013.

Kicking Up Dust in Austin at SXSWedu

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:19:16 +0000

By, Van L. Davis, Ph.D., Director of Special Projects, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

This week, NGLC headed off to SXSWedu in sunny Austin, Texas. Only in its third year, this conference has grown to 6,000 attendees from 30 countries and draws an exciting mix of instructional designers, faculty, policymakers, funders, and educational technology entrepreneurs. Keynote speakers this year included Asenath Andrews (principal of Catherine Ferguson Academy, an alternative public high school for teen mothers that provides early childhood education services to their children), Anant Agrwal (president of edX), Andrew Ng (co-founder of Coursera), and—as a culmination on Thursday –a closing keynote by Bill Gates, accompanied by Dianne Tavenner of Summit Public Schools, another NGLC grantee.

America’s Call for Higher Education Redesign

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:36:00 +0000

The most recent Lumina Foundation and Gallup report, "America's Call for Higher Education Redesign," was released on February 5, 2013. The findings suggest that the respondents acknowledge the critical role of postsecondary education in employment and financial stability, but think the current model is flawed. Three-quarters said college is unaffordable, and more than half said the quality of higher education is the same as or worse than in the past.

Some of the questions addressed in the study are:

Advancing the Next Generation of Learning through Evidence: What We Learned at ELI 2013

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:44:19 +0000

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the NGLC blog at nextgenlearning.org.

Several conversations, sessions, and keynote speakers at this year’s annual meeting of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, ELI2013, focused on

Future of Higher Education

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 20:14:04 +0000

Emerging Technologies, Innovation, and Academic Transformation: A Report on the ELI Focus Session

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:42:30 +0000

On October 2 and 3, 2012, the ELI teaching and learning community gathered for an online focus session on emerging technologies, innovation, and academic transformation. This white paper is a synthesis of the key ideas, themes, and concepts that came out of the focus session. This white paper also includes links to supporting focus session materials, recordings, and resources. It represents a harvesting of the key elements that we, as a teaching and learning community, need to keep in mind as we explore higher education incubator models, various pilot structures and processes, rubrics and methodologies for evaluating pilots, and considerations and tools to scale innovations to varying degrees.

Why MOOCs are like Farmville

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:35:33 +0000

Another day, another report from one of the thought leaders on higher education. This time it is from Moody’s, which proclaims the death of the traditional model of higher education. While the concerns raised by Moody’s are real – diminished resources due to state budget cuts, declining family incomes, and less willingness by students to take on debt – we should hesitate before leaping to the conclusion that these challenges necessitate a radical change, through massive adoption of online learning technologies such as MOOCs. Count me among the skeptical – I’m not yet convinced that MOOCs are going to lead students to jettison a traditional higher education experience anytime soon.

Ultra-Affordable Online Courses and the Transformation of Higher Education

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:33:05 +0000

Brian Voss and Burck Smith will explore higher education's changing landscape and what it means for our IT community. Join us for a discussion spanning traditional institutions, entrepreneurs, regulators, policymakers, and for-profit providers that focus on the learning experience, business models, and future prospects of open content, MOOCs, and more.

Hallmarks of the Breakthrough Models, #1: Modular Courses

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:35:11 +0000

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a series from Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC). Each post highlights a distinguishing design characteristic of NGLC’s recently funded Breakthrough Postsecondary Models, as described in their profiles. This post originally appeared on the NGLC blog at http://nextgenlearning.org/blog.

Federal Report Highlights The Economic Case for Higher Education

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:14:14 +0000

The U.S. Departments of The Treasury and Education recently announced the release of a joint report highlighting the economic value of higher education achievement for individuals and the country as a whole. Entitled The Economics of Higher Education, the report confirms the continuing importance of postsecondary success to economic progress, including key findings such as the following:

· There is substantial evidence that education raises earnings. The median weekly earnings of a full-time, bachelor’s degree holder in 2011 were 64 percent higher than those of a high school graduate ($1,053 compared to $638).

Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:02:55 +0000

The long-promised technology revolution in education is now possible—but hardly inevitable. Educators and policymakers must act today to unleash the potential of technology to improve instruction, learning, and student outcomes. Successful institutions will deploy technology in a strategic way to enable a closed-loop instructional system—a comprehensive, holistic approach to education.

This report delineates how the technology of today and tomorrow can serve as a catalyst for change in primary and secondary education. It explores how those in education--from teachers to education leaders and policymakers--can harness the benefits of new technology to dramatically improve student performance and educational outcomes. This analysis has grown out of dozens of education projects that The Boston Consulting Group has conducted over the past ten years while working with clients ranging from national, state, and local governments around the world to school districts, charter school operators, universities, and for-profit higher-education companies. All illuminated the immense challenges that educators face--and the pressing need for innovative solutions.

Written by Alison Bailey, Tyce Henry, Lane McBride, J. Puckett

Podcast: Discovery in a Digital World

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:32:47 +0000

Speaker: Edward L. Ayers, President, University of Richmond

In the most effective teaching, students create new knowledge even as they learn. Digital environments possess remarkable capacities to foster this excitement of discovery among large, diverse, and widely distributed numbers of people. When thoughtfully designed, these engines of discovery can offer rich repositories of information and useful tools to explore them. Online teaching and traditional classrooms can take much greater advantage of these capacities than they have thus far. Imagining and building exploratory capacity offers exciting challenges for every discipline, constructing new bridges between novice and expert, teaching and scholarship.

Music: "New Pop Wave" by sebastian6

Improvisation and Innovation: Rhetoric and Reality - Sponsored by Tuition Management Systems

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:29:15 +0000

We are unlikely to achieve the kind of institutional agility we desire—openness to new ideas, responsiveness to a changing world—if we persist in addressing questions of innovation, improvisation, and collaboration outside the context of our institutional reality. Hence the address will focus on issues of institutional design as they relate to the likelihood that improvisation and fresh thinking (for that matter, thinking at all) is a serious option.

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:42:48 +0000

Clay Shirky provides a thoughtful discussion in this blog on MOOCs and its early stages of possible disruption of higher education.

Breakthrough Models for College Completion: The Next Generation of Models for Higher Education

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:51:00 +0000

This compilation of Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grantee profiles illustrates the innovative approaches of 10 new postsecondary degree program designs awarded grants under NGLC's third wave of funding, which focused on "Breakthrough Models for College Completion." It provides practical details particularly of interest to those designing and planning new innovative degree programs.

The introduction describes common attributes across the portfolio, including competency-based learning, disaggregated faculty roles, tuition models that reward persistence, data to target supports, and self-paced instruction. Following the brief overview, each individual model is profiled. The individual profiles summarize key features through graphics and at-a-glance facts. They also offer important descriptive information about the instructional and financial models and their unique methods and structures to provide high-quality associate’s or bachelor’s degrees at affordable costs, particularly for underserved populations.

Next Generation Learning Challenges accelerates educational innovation through applied technology to dramatically improve college readiness and completion in the United States. To learn more about NGLC and the grantees it supports, visit nextgenlearning.org.

The Case for a Campus Makerspace

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:32:14 +0000

What will the college campus of the future look like? How will technology change how we teach and learn at universities? When we attempt to answer those questions, we often emphasize the impact of the digital and the virtual. But new technologies offer ways for us to rethink our offline physical learning spaces, not just our online ones. Growing out of the recent revival in hobbyist "hacking" (both hardware and software), Makerspaces have become interesting community learning places where people can play, make, and hack together in areas like 3D printers, electronic textiles, robotics, programming, and design. As we consider the future of the college campus, can we make room for Makerspaces?

Next-Generation Learning: How Do We Get There from Here?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:32:10 +0000

What does tech-enabled next-generation learning mean to you, and what does it look like on your campus? What excites you most about the potential it offers? What is your greatest concern about if the innovations we're seeing today-MOOCs, online degrees, digital texts, mobile learning-were to be widely used? What might be lost? What does an institution that actively supports and accelerates next-generation learning look like? What are some signals coming from your campus that tech-enabled next-generation learning is showing results in terms of student outcomes? In a truly student-centered and learning-focused approach to education, traditional notions of a higher education campus, faculty, credit policies, and other structures need to change. But how do we get there from here?

The Current and Future State of Higher Education

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:06:20 +0000

Although there may be disagreement about where higher education is headed, few will disagree that we are in a time of change, a time in which a unique set of challenges have emerged. How should we respond to the impact of open educational resources, to the opportunities of big data and analytics, to the large amounts of venture capital and foundation funding being invested in postsecondary education? What new organizational and leadership models are called for? An open online course, Current/Future State of Higher Education, conducted in fall 2012, evaluated the change pressures that face universities and the opportunities that can help universities prepare for the future state of higher education. In this webinar, the presenters will harvest the key ideas, insights, and discussion points that came to light in the course of the online course, inviting further discussion with the webinar attendees.

Rethinking University Models in Light of Technology

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:29:04 +0000

An event at the National Press Club, "Will US Colleges and Universities Lead or Lag in Education Innovation?", continued to probe how technology will continue to influence the evolution of colleges and universities at a time when the Obama administration is pressuring institutions to reduce college costs and increase college completion. Not surprisingly, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was the first topic discussed with most panelists observing that it is too early to tell what the impact of MOOCs will be on learning. Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, said that "MOOCs represent a sea-level rise". He cautions that "a sea-level rise floats all boats and everyone will need to adapt to more powerful tools." Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, also warned that it is "

Democratizing Higher Education

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:19:05 +0000

In this keynote session from The Sloan Consortium Conference, Sebastian Thrun discusses his venture into MOOCs. In 2011, Thrun took his Stanford graduate level class online, and 160,000 students signed up. 23,000 graduated at Stanford level. Underlying this class was a teaching model that emphasizes student engagement, problem solving, and free online access.

NACUBO Overview of Sequestration Implications

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:14:35 +0000

The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) has provided a concise overview of the implications for federal student aid and research programs if the pending sequestration (i.e., automatic budget cuts) approved as part of the federal debt ceiling fight goes into effect at the start of 2013 as currently scheduled. Essentially, depending on the type of program, most of what higher education holds dear in the federal budget (except for Pell Grants) will see either a 7.6% or an 8.2% cut (with defense research programs receiving a 9.4% cut).

Next Generation Learning: The Pathway to Possibility

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:46:22 +0000

“Next generation learning” is about engaging with today’s students through “next generation” teaching and learning designs. In this white paper, the authors present a distilled set of observations about the innovative approaches used by grantees of Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), a national initiative that seeks to identify and accelerate technology-enhanced solutions that significantly improve student outcomes. The resulting framework was developed with both K–12 and higher education in mind, since NGLC works with both educational systems. It assembles and organizes the myriad aspects of designing, implementing, and enabling next generation learning strategies at scale:

Defined learning goals indicating readiness for college, career, and civic life
Measurement of progress against those goals
Learning designs that are personalized, competency-based, supportive, data-informed, inclusive, and enabled by technology
Effective implementation encompassing fundamental restructuring of roles, resources, and infrastructure and continuous improvement cycles
Enabling conditions, both internal and external, for that implementation to proceed with fidelity to the original design
Sufficient investment and evidence, among other environmental factors, to allow for rapid scale-up

This white paper is a revision of the version originally released in September 2012. It was revised based on comment from readers with the goal of better reflecting experiences and perspectives across the wider field. Additional comments are welcome and may be sent directly to nglc@educause.edu.

ERO Podcast: Chief of Staff for the Khan Academy, Jessica Yuen

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:55:55 +0000

In this podcast, we talk with Chief of Staff for the Khan Academy, Jessica Yuen. In our conversation, she discusses the Khan Academy's use of analytics, attitude toward affordability for students, and the future of higher education.

ERO Podcast: Cable Green of Creative Commons Talks About Openness

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:49:44 +0000

In this podcast, Cable Green talks about Open Access, Open Resources, and Open Policies. Cable Green is director of global learning for Creative Commons.