The idea that change was afoot for higher education burst on the public consciousness in 2012 with Sebastian Thrun’s announcement that he had resigned his professorship at Stanford to begin offering free, high-quality college courses to the world. It was a bold statement, but it was only the first. Stanford and MIT each announced shortly afterward that they were offering MOOCs. Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, became a spokesman for short-format lectures that would reach millions. Start-up capital poured into research labs and storefront software companies more reminiscent of the early days of the Internet than of the staid, bureaucratically top-heavy business of running a college. The difference captured the attention of international news media.
The year 2012 was about massive open online courses, but it was also about the value of a college education along with the ease with which simple course content could be replicated and distributed to anyone with an Internet connection. To survive in the future, a college would have to add value beyond a simple recital of information, because that was being rapidly commoditized by technology.
But even simple survival may not be easy when landscapes shift. Colleges are generally conceived as entities that require customers to purchase every service at one bundled price. As soon as students realize that they do not have to pay for unadorned content, the natural question is: “Well, exactly what do I have to pay for?” Affordable quality is a goal of those trying to revolutionize education, but it is achieved through an unbundling of a college’s offerings that allows students to pay only for the value they receive. This is an innocent-sounding but significant shift in the landscape of higher education.
These major changes would leave education poorer but for an improved understanding of how to organize the learning process in a way that more closely matches how the brain learns. Learning begins deep within the brain, where a continual cycle of neurotransmitter production and reinforcement literally rewires neurons as small chunks of learned information move from short- to long-term memory.
It is that chemical engine of motivation and reward that new educational technology supports. And if its inventors are correct, the result will be a different kind of classroom, in which long-form lectures have all but disappeared. What will fill the void is an approach called mastery learning, which relies on continuous feedback from the instructor to the student on the student’s progress, and which has been known since the 1980s to deliver superior results in almost every classroom. Cost has been the principal barrier to the widespread adoption of mastery-learning techniques. Without new technology, this kind of classroom learning is prohibitively expensive. The goal is to remove that obstacle.
The unbundling of college offerings allows students to pay only for the value they receive.
It’s a long way, however, from understanding the principles of improved learning to changing what happens in classrooms. Educational innovations often face high hurdles, but the development of technology-enhanced learning is accelerating. The outlines of what is achievable are apparent — and they do not resemble the first primitive MOOC technology or the faltering business models of traditional online education. “Show me the industry that has withstood the advance of technology,” say the innovators — and history usually proves them correct.
One such advance in technology is artificial intelligence, which makes it possible to personalize classrooms even when course content is distributed to a mass audience. Algorithms predict where students are likely to have problems, and provide clues to teachers about how to proceed. Even more important, technological innovation can be used to erase inequalities in circumstances — cognitive ability, social status, academic knowledge — that plague postsecondary education as it scales to the masses.
In fact, if technology-enhanced learning succeeds, it will be because of scale: The technologies of the revolution are the technologies of the Internet. That makes them profoundly different from those of the past. Innovators plan to transplant the business of higher education to the Internet, with all the gains in productivity that the move might entail. Improved classroom productivity means, among other things, that the structure of academic institutions will change.
The expanded scale also means that the number of professors will necessarily decline — a profound shift for an industry that computes the ratio of instructors to students and uses the result as a measure of quality. Teams will form around effective teachers, but they will be teams of specialists. This flies in the face of older models of education, yet it is where the small band of innovators is taking us, because higher education cannot continue to expand at the current rate. Conquering the problem of scale will require new kinds of institutions.
Of course, not everyone is happy about that, which is why those who are trying to revolutionize education will run headlong into an entrenched and successful academic culture that abhors the kind of change that innovation seeks to bring.
Colleges that base their value on guarding access to the high-quality dissemination of information will find their gatekeeper status undermined, bypassed by a new economy. Innovators are counting on this. If their students learn more and are better able to compete in a global marketplace, it will not matter that they do not have the usual badges of acceptance conveyed by academic peers.
Today higher education is engaged in a global revolution, and there will be heroes and martyrs among the revolutionaries. Ideas that seem fresh and ambitious may fall to the realities of economics, politics, or the changing tastes of a global public. There may be a new awakening in which the diffusion of knowledge is viewed as essential to preserving modern thought and culture. There may be agreements that codify a commitment to self-governance, integrity, egalitarianism, truth, and interpersonal trust that collectively define both the responsibilities of society and the obligations of members of academic communities.
Knowledge may be viewed in the future as a community possession. The global academic enterprise may adopt the mission of the Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng, of ensuring that high-quality instruction is a global right. Bright-eyed revolutionaries may cause otherwise immutable bureaucracies to relinquish their grip on access to education.
No matter what happens, colleges in the future will have been forever transformed because of the events that a few innovators set in motion at the start of the millennium. Exactly what that transformation will look like can only be guessed at; the outlines become apparent through the lens of history. The reasons that humankind invented universities are eternal, and what we ask today of scholars and their institutions will not be greatly changed by the successes or failures of a few technologies or new ways of doing business. In this vast new landscape, no institution has an entitled position.
Richard A. DeMillo is a professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This essay is adapted from his new book, Revolution in Higher Education: How a Small Band of Innovators Will Make College Accessible and Affordable (MIT Press, 2015).
