Does Technology Ever Reduce the Costs of Teaching?
By Corinne RuffJanuary 26, 2016
Randall Bergen, an assistant to the president of Bethel University in Minnesota, was initially excited by the hype and promise of flipped classrooms, MOOCs, and hybrid courses. He hoped the innovations could reduce costs. But in reality, more technology has meant more spending for his university. And like many officials, that left him discouraged as the hype has worn off.
One question in particular has stuck in his head: Do any tech innovations actually lower the cost of delivery in higher education?
We’re sorry, something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one),
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
Randall Bergen, an assistant to the president of Bethel University in Minnesota, was initially excited by the hype and promise of flipped classrooms, MOOCs, and hybrid courses. He hoped the innovations could reduce costs. But in reality, more technology has meant more spending for his university. And like many officials, that left him discouraged as the hype has worn off.
One question in particular has stuck in his head: Do any tech innovations actually lower the cost of delivery in higher education?
“People have thought, mostly people outside of higher ed, that if we could just find the right technology, we could bring down the cost of higher education dramatically,” he said. “We who live in this world see that that’s not likely to happen in the near future.”
Without much optimism, Mr. Bergen brought his question to our attention this month, after we asked readers to submit issues about technology and education that puzzled them. His question received the most votes from other readers, and as promised, here’s our attempt to to answer it.
The Chronicle spoke with three consultants who have all advised colleges on how to reduce instructional costs and use technology to their advantage. Below are some of the takeaways from our conversations. Their responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ADVERTISEMENT
A Model Change
Our experts agreed on at least one thing. Adding technology just to add technology isn’t a model for saving colleges money. To reduce instructional costs, new technologies must coincide with a change in process or model. That may present challenges for liberal-arts colleges that want to preserve the small class sizes and discussion-focused methods that are hard to replace with digital alternatives.
The Experts
Bryan Alexander, president of Bryan Alexander Consulting, LLC
Paul Freedman, founder of Entangled Ventures
Carolyn G. Jarmon, vice president of the National Center for Academic Transformation
Mr. Freedman: In order to have technology lower costs, it needs some investment somewhere. Either it really requires a lot of institutional change, like competency-based education or hybrid programs, or a small institutional change, like things that make grading more effective. If faculty members are able to teach an extra session a semester because they reduced the time it takes to grade papers, that’s a huge reduction in costs.
Ms. Jarmon: Suppose an institution has 100 students in precalculus and they taught it in sections of 20. If they effectively used instructional software, they will find that they could have automatic grading of homework, automatic grading of low-stakes quizzing, and students could rework and have it automatically graded. The faculty member doesn’t carry home all those papers. Maybe the institution now could offer four sections of 25 because they have offloaded to the technology some of the grading the professor did before. You need to think about what the technology does well, or better, and what people need to do.
Mr. Alexander: Over all, technology usually does not help reduce instructional costs. Only if we take advantage of open access can we really cut institutional costs.
Flipped Classrooms
Many colleges are trying so-called flipped classrooms, where students watch video lectures on their own time online ahead of in-class discussions, so that face-to-face time is focused on discussion of the material. But often, that doesn’t mean savings.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Alexander: “Flipped” classes really, unless you do them in a certain way, don’t save money; they simply improve the quality of experience. One way you can use them to save money is a way most faculty members are uncomfortable with. That is, if you share lectures across classes between professors. Faculty members are uncomfortable with this because it reduces their role in the classroom. Ultimately one way of doing this is having video lectures [from another college], and then having adjuncts teach discussion sections. That saves money, but that’s something that makes a lot of faculty members uncomfortable.
Mr. Freedman: Liberal-arts colleges should be liberal-arts colleges. It’s part of their mission. It’s part of what they do well. But there’s not necessarily the same benefit for small classroom size across the entire curriculum. I can’t understand how you liberal-artsify calculus, for example. If classes like those can be taught in online or hybrid-type modality, it certainly can make the economic model more positive for those classes. If you compare the economic model of a liberal-arts college to a four-year flagship, the four-year flagship public institution generates a surplus in all of its first- and second-year classes because it fills the classrooms.
Ms. Jarmon: Software can be well integrated in introductory courses. It doesn’t mean every course should be online. it means for some parts of the course, the technology can do a very good job of low-stakes quizzing, of grading homework, of showing examples. We have learned that students will watch examples in courses where doing so has been helpful to them.
Consortiums and Collaboration
One topic that emerged was not really about technology at all, but about working together with peer institutions, to buy in tandem or share details about their experiments.
Mr. Alexander: Having three, four, 10, 100 schools trying the same thing is just great. In terms of software development, it lets you see flaws more quickly, it gives you more hands to fix things, and it helps you spread out the cost. We’re still not good at that in academe; we would much rather work with a company than another college. But it can be a huge win. Along with that is to use social media. Use blogs or Google Plus, or LinkedIn or podcasts or whatever to share the experiment as it goes, because that’s a terrific way to get feedback, to spread the word and build a reputation.
ADVERTISEMENT
For example, the Council of Independent Colleges has been doing a series of upper-level humanities seminars entirely online. These are really exciting because they may ultimately help campuses save money.
Mr. Freedman: Where certain programs or back-end things are done collaboratively at a lower cost, and that cost savings is used to lower tuition or is used to invest more in education, that’s an opportunity. For example, things like buying necessary software in bulk, hosting, and tech support, which can lower admin costs such that there can be higher investment in teaching and learning, or a reduction in tuition.
Pilot Programs
Some small liberal-arts colleges need to spread the word to start-up companies that they are looking to innovate and experiment with small, time-limited pilot programs to see what can save money in the long run, according to our experts.
Mr. Freedman: Be more open to very small-scale pilots. If you look at the colleges that have made a name for themselves as innovators, one consistent trend I’ve seen is openness and a willingness to do small-scale experimentation using different models to see what works and what doesn’t. There are private liberal-arts colleges like Bellevue University [in Nebraska] that are really far along in terms of competency-based-education models and are really far along in utilizing corporate partnerships, another real key. There is no doubt students who chose a liberal-arts college want a personalized experience, they want the critical-thinking support, but they also want clearer career outcomes and pathways to be able to get jobs.
Ms. Jarmon: One thing to be careful about is maintenance. If it’s free, it won’t be maintained.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Alexander: Get students involved as much as possible. Having students play a key role — in beta testing, coding, assessment, needs assessment — that really makes a big difference, and it makes a big difference to a student.
Open Resources
Open-source software or information is that which can be freely shared and adapted. Experts recommended that professors join groups such as Clamp Moodle Exchange, which can help liberal-arts colleges personalize free learning-management systems to fit their needs. Using free and open online materials can also save students money on textbooks and scholarly articles.
Mr. Alexander: Open education resources flat-out save money. They don’t save the faculty money. These are resources that anyone can access, anyone can share, and they cost either nothing or very little. If you go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology website, they have a project called OpenCourseWare where every class in the MIT catalog has its materials available online. A professor could just go over and grab some of those notes, modify and use them. Or a student feeling frustrated in an engineering class could go there and look at the notes. This doesn’t save the institution money necessarily. It saves students money.
‘No Magic Solution’
After speaking with the experts, we got back in touch with Mr. Bergen to hear his reaction.
“It feels like today there is no magic solution,” Mr. Bergen said. “But we need as many ideas as we can get right now.”
ADVERTISEMENT
For an administrator at a small liberal-arts college, some ideas are more realistic than others, he added. For instance, the idea of borrowing lecture videos from other colleges and reducing the number of full-time professors would be a significant philosophical change that would take away from what a liberal-arts education aims to accomplish, he said. For him, it doesn’t seem like that’s something liberal-arts colleges like Bethel are ready to consider.
Yet working in a consortium with other colleges to share online courses or pilot programs “makes all kinds of sense to do right now because it furthers our mission; it doesn’t detract.”
Ultimately, Mr. Bergen said, a lot of experimentation and thinking still needs to happen before he will be satisfied with an answer.
“It’s going to be a lot of small choices over time that are progressive to help us solve the problem,” he said.
Join the conversation about this article on the Re:Learning Facebook page.