When it comes to excitement about the role of technology and entrepreneurship in reshaping education, it’s hard to beat the ASU+GSV Education Innovation Summit, held last month in Arizona, with 2,100 investors, companies, policy wonks, and even officials from actual colleges and schools attending.
It’s the kind of conference where folks like the founder of the Minerva Project offered previews of the online learning platform for his new institution with the none-too-subtle declaration, “Now you can see the future of education,” even though the first Minerva student has yet to take a class.
It’s also an event where serious scholars of innovation, like John Seely Brown, show up and are surprised to find themselves awed by the energy and sheer variety of companies and organizations working, as he put it, to exploit technology “to amplify the learning, not just cut the costs.”
Yet one of the most telling moments of that three-day marathon of panels, speeches, and company pitches during this (self-proclaimed) “Davos in the Desert” came in a small session titled “Data Dream.” Philip Regier, executive vice provost at Arizona State University Online, let loose his frustration about the lack of serious research behind the many solutions being pitched to improve retention, graduation, and student engagement.
“No one is really getting serious about efficacy,” said Mr. Regier, whose institution welcomes partnerships with companies and works with more than 100 of them. Arizona State is a co-sponsor of the conference with GSV Advisors, a merchant bank. But many publishers and start-ups treat efficacy as a “buzzword,” he said. If studies are presented, “they aren’t rigorous.”
An equally telling moment occurred during the smaller “Innovation+Disruption” Symposium, held last week in New York City, with more than 300 presidents, deans, trustees, and other representatives of small liberal-arts colleges. The featured speaker was Clayton M. Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor known for his theories on how stalwarts in any industry—higher education included—can be toppled by low-end competitors that use technology and new business models to capture a slice of the pie and then move up the market.
Not for nothing is Mr. Christensen sometimes considered the grim reaper of higher education, and at last week’s event, he held true to form. It’s conceivable, he said, that as many as half of all colleges could be in some form of bankruptcy or reorganization within 10 to 15 years. “I hope I’m wrong, but the theory says we have to worry about this,” he said.
Used correctly, technology can deliver education, create social networks, and measure student engagement more effectively than live teaching, he said. The one thing that cannot be so easily “disrupted,” he said, is the ability of a professor to influence a student’s life—a conclusion that was echoed in the survey of college graduates released last week by Gallup.
He then listened as a panel of six current and former presidents responded, some of them, like Colgate University’s Jeffrey Herbst and Grinnell College’s Raynard S. Kington, expressing worry, but others insisting that the disruption he was predicting was no threat to them because their kind of personalized, residential education was, as the former Kenyon College president S. Georgia Nugent put it, “not a commodity.” As Hamilton College’s president, Joan Hinde Stewart, insisted, “We’re doing a wonderful job in higher education.”
From the audience, Mr. Christensen then stood up and gently but pointedly asked the panelists to imagine how different the message would be if they were joined by the presidents of a few other institutions—Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, Brigham Young University-Idaho, and Khan Academy.
Such ventures, offering lower-cost education based on distance education and approaches like competency-based education, are the toast of the circuit for the GSV-meeting crowd. but the liberal-arts-college presidents seemed mostly unimpressed. Adam F. Falk, Williams College’s president, speculated that probably they’d make “the legitimate point that they are trying to get to scale,” but said he doubted that the ventures had the ability to use technology to replicate the kind of student-to-student and student-to-professor connections that are the hallmarks of small liberal-arts colleges.
“They’d say we’ve got the cost and return-on-investment calculation wrong and it will shift to their side,” added Mr. Herbst, but “we disagree.”
Mr. Kington allowed that those kinds of institutions make better use of data analytics on student outcomes than Grinnell and similar institutions do. “I’ve had faculty tell me, ‘I don’t think you can measure what we do,’ " he said. He doesn’t buy it. “I think we have to start being more self-critical.”
Yet even as he acknowledged the role of the emerging new models, Mr. Kington returned to liberal-arts colleges’ advantages. Those colleges transmit knowledge, teach how to apply it, and provide a residential context for the “lived experience,” he said. Grinnell is focusing on the latter two, especially the residential experience, which, he noted, “will never be replicated online.”
Mr. Herbst, whose university (this reporter’s alma mater) organized the event, said he wanted to have the discussion because too often, the conversation about disruption and innovation in higher education is unsophisticated, presented as “the false choice of apocalypse or stasis.”
Moving Up-Market
Yet as these two events suggest, there is still a disconnect between these two worldviews. Clearly the Innovation Summit, which was heavy on investors (more than 200 this year by the organizers’ count), companies (230), and entrepreneurs (535), could use a little more of the rigorous research that Mr. Regier craves—and a little less hype. (One positive sign: Copley Retention Systems, which sells software to track how colleges assist students, announced at the conference that the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, would conduct a two-year, independent evaluation of its product, measuring impacts at 10 campuses.)
And if the tone at Innovation+Disruption is indicative, perhaps the community of small liberal-arts colleges and other traditional institutions could benefit from a little more apprehension about the changes afoot in higher education and their possible impact, even on selective private colleges. It’s easy to think that such colleges sit above the ferment.
David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, suggested as much. He’d be far more worried, he said, if he were president of a big, impersonal university where teaching and student engagement are not already the norm. “That’s what we’ve been doing for years,” he said.
But already some of the disrupters are moving up-market—and with a lower price point.
The Minerva Schools venture, which is accredited through the Keck Graduate Institute and plans to charge $10,000 a year for an elite global-immersion program that could eventually enroll several thousand students, is one of them. “That’s clearly aimed at us,” Colgate’s Mr. Herbst said. (The Minerva students—just a couple of dozen to start—will spend their first year in San Francisco and then, as Minerva announced at the conference, their second year in Buenos Aires and Berlin.)
Even so, he said, colleges like Colgate and Grinnell need not ask simply, “How much will online education impinge on us?,” but also “figure out what’s our place” in innovating with technology.
Karen Harpp, an associate professor of geology at Colgate, described how she used videos, real-time re-enactments of events using Twitter, and other technology-enhanced approaches to teach a course, “Advent of the Atomic Bomb,” to students and hundreds of alumni. “We have the capacity to do something extremely original,” she said, also noting that at many colleges, such experimentation is not built into the rewards system.
Indeed, that may apply to college culture as well. Erland Stevens, a chemistry professor at Davidson College who talked about his experience teaching a MOOC on medicinal chemistry to more than 5,000 students on the edX platform, said in an interview that when he was chosen for the course, some of his faculty colleagues congratulated him with words like, “I hope it’s a flop.” They were only kidding, he thinks. He, too, was excited by the opportunity to experiment. When he next teaches the MOOC, he plans to use some of his on-campus students to help design the course materials and help him teach it to the off-campus students.
Kathleen deLaski, a founder of the Education Design Lab, a nonprofit organization that creates new education models, took part in both the Arizona and the New York events. “The excitement about the investment opportunity that you hear at the GSV summit is all about scale,” she said. “Adaptive learning was the hot thing” there, along with systems for student retention and tools and companies to help students get jobs.
For the liberal-arts colleges, she said, the focus was more specific, ensuring that students get the fullest possible value from their education.
To that end, career-center directors and other officials from dozens of colleges stayed on for the afternoon to brainstorm ways to improve their career-planning services and offerings. After all, with the current job market, it’s that innovation that may matter most for small liberal-arts colleges eager to establish their value.
Correction (5/15/2014, 6:19 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the Education Design Lab. It is a nonprofit organization that helps create new education models. It is not a program at George Mason University, but it is working with GMU. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
