What happened to newspapers will happen to Universities.
David Brooks makes the case today that we see a Tipping Point in how secondary education will work. It's focus will be online and global.
The elite US universities that have the brand are taking no chances. They are not resisting. They are going full steam ahead to capture the global prize. 300 million Indian middle class who all speak English and value education. Millions of Chinese who share this passion.
And what about all of the North American kids who cannot afford 4 years in residence and the fees tied into the old way. And what about the millions of European kids who are in the same boat?
This then compels UPEI and other Atlantic Universities to think their future through immediately.
Teaching face to face in a factory like setting and using factory processes at high costs is now no longer the the centre of the system. It will no longer be enough to recruit foreign students to come here.
You also have a lot of infrastructure that has to be paid for.
You have a staff and administrators for whom all of this is novel.
You have a culture that has shut out the web.
Will you be open enough to see the peril and the opportunity?
(Link Here) The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.
This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online.
President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.
