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Digital Higher Education, Business Models, and Horizons

“Hotels for Hyphochondriacs” From More Intelligent Life, March/April 2012

These are heady days for digital higher education. For advocates of all-things-digital, myself included, it appears we’ve earned our permanent place at the table. Whether fully online, blended or a supplementing classroom education, digital higher ed is now a strategic issue for colleges and universities. Online enrolment continues to experience double-digit growth. Investors are once again lining up to fund new companies in educational technology and media. Not a week goes by without a breathless article being written about “revolution” or “disruption” in higher education brought on by the onslaught of technology. If David Noble were still with us, he’d be one unhappy camper.

But there are very significant obstacles standing in the way of higher education fully leveraging technology for purposes of instruction. We’ve yet to address these head-on.

My pessimism, if that’s what it is, stems not from our lack of knowledge about how students learn; we already know far more than we apply. And it’s not because of the limits of technology; higher ed trails other sectors in its use of available technology. The obstacle is organizational or, in the language of the moment, our “business model”.

Le Modèle D’Entreprise: An Ill-Fit

The opportunities made possible by technology for improving learning and productivity in higher education are in many respects at odds with the established business model of higher education. They don’t fit together well.

Our business model includes such matters as how we fund our institutions (tuition, public funds, endowments, etc), the kinds of resources we acquire and from whom, how we reward talent and the kinds of talent we seek out, our notions of what constitutes a “great university”, what we choose to outsource and what we do in-house, and how we compete for funds, prestige and students. Although the business model of higher education is one of the more complex in existence, the majority of colleges and universities in North America, other than proprietary colleges, are remarkably consistent in these and other respects.

Please: To note that the institution of higher education has a business model does not suggest that it is a business, or that it should be more business-like. This is a common misunderstanding (example of the misunderstanding). Every organization has a business model, whether it’s IBM or Greenpeace. Even Mother Teresa’s charity, Missionaries of Charity, had a business model.

Consider, for example, social media. There is a great deal of excitement about the use of social media in higher education. But outside of marketing and community engagement, it proves an awkward fit in higher ed – particularly when we attempt to integrate it into our instructional model. While social media is particularly well suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people – with no clear or prescribed beginning and end – higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. a fixed and standard set of assessments). Social media is user-generated and leaderless; that’s what makes it so compelling. On the other hand, higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users within a single, overarching community. A high volume of users provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. Twitter and Linked In have well over 100 million users. Higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. average of 40 students per course).

Consider rich media. Since the dawn of digital education, pundits have dreamt about the potential to provide every student with access to brilliant digital content that thoughtfully merges the best software, subject-matter knowledge, and pedagogy. Unfortunately, this vision crashes headfirst with conventional notions about the role of academics in teaching (which would be radically reduced when rich media takes centre stage), how we finance course development and to what level, and how reputation for both academics and institutions relies so heavily on subject-matter knowledge. It’s not accidental that rich media is largely limited to K12 and corporate learning contexts; they have different business models that better enable the use of this kind of content.

Matching Technology with the Right Business Model

This is not to suggest that social media and rich media can’t be used in higher education. They can, and they are. But the business model used by the vast majority of institutions will, on average, make their use less effective, more complicated, take longer to achieve, and cost more. No amount of talk at conferences or online communities about what we in higher education “ought” or “should” do will change this. Business models are the structures in which we work; they frame the possibilities.

There’s a theoretical basis to this view. Christensen’s study of disruptive innovation contends that organizations need to match new technologies with the right business model in order to fully leverage its potential. By simply dropping a new technology into the structure and constraints of the existing, traditional business model, we dramatically weaken its capacity to increase value. We need to align the technology with an enabling business model.

Much of what constitutes technology in higher education has, to date, been successful precisely because it doesn’t challenge the existing business model. The core value proposition of the LMS, for example, is that it allows instructors with minimal technical skills to create and manage web-based courses with limited assistance. In this respect, the design of the technology mirrors and ultimately reinforces the organizational model of classroom education in which the Instructor serves as a one-person operation. For the institution, this ensures that the LMS does not disrupt the existing and deeply embedded organization of roles and responsibilities within the institution, which in turn reduces costly reorganizational changes, as well as blow back from academics that are accustomed to working with high levels of autonomy.

To significantly improve the value of instructional technology and media for instruction in higher education we need start looking more closely at how our institutions operate. It’s not the technology that will limit us. And it’s certainly not a lack of research into how college students learn best. It’s something much more difficult – our business model.

The LMS: It’s Not All About You

Minding the Gap: Instructional Technology and Pedagogy

OESP’s and (Non) Disruptive Innovation

KnowU & MyEdu: Two Approaches to Social Media in Higher Education

Higher education is working hard to find the best ways to integrate social media into its practices. They’ve approached it from a number of angles: marketing, community building, student support, and instruction. Instigators behind the efforts include software vendors looking to build the next edu social platform, colleges, individual educators, and on a less formal basis, the students themselves.

As of late 2011, there are very few scalable, institution-wide initiatives – but a great deal of isolated experimentation by innovators. The opportunities seem endless, but higher education management professionals are on the lookout for the right approach to make social media work for them today.

Not all areas of higher ed will be equally well-suited to the opportunities that social media presents. Of all of the possibilities, integrating social media and instruction may be the most difficult, for example – due to the conflicting properties of social media and higher ed. While social media is particularly well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people – with no clear or prescribed beginning and end – higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. syllabi). Social media is user-generated and leaderless. Higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users. High volume provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. (Although Twitter and Linked In have over 100 million users, only a fraction of the users are of significance to any one user.) On the other hand, higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 100 students).

This is not to say that higher education won’t find ways to use social media for instructional purposes. Innovative educators are experimenting with new approaches and some of these strategies will stick, be shared, and ultimately picked up by other educators in time. But at this relatively early stage in its development, the low-hanging fruit of social media for higher education will likely be found in the areas of marketing, building communities and student support.

MyEdu

Two initiatives – MyEdu and KnowU from Harrison College – offer a glimpse of the possibilities.

MyEdu is a Texas-based company that has built a student-facing platform that combines a number of applications designed to help students manage their education careers. The platform includes course scheduling, textbook ordering, facebook-style interaction with other students, reviews of instructors and courses by other students. Soon to be added is information about graduate and professional schools, tools to manage transfer credits, and mobile applications.

Frank Lyman, SVP at MyEdu suggests that the core value of the platform is that it helps students make more informed decisions about their educational careers. In this respect, MyEdu is part of a larger drive to improve the volume and quality of information available to higher education’s stakeholders. Students, parents, government (e.g. Spellings Commission), and policy professionals (e.g. Education Sector) argue that we need better information about higher education in order to track student success, reward better schools, minimize student debt, and increase the speed with which students complete their programs.

Most of the information available to students within MyEdu is user-generated or “scraped” from public sites. Presumably, MyEdu will eventually need to gain access to college-based applications, such as student information systems, to further improve the currency and value of the information that the platform provides. But this will require the participation of the institutions, not all of which will want to make this kind of information available. MyEdu’s alliance with the University of Texas, announced in the Fall, will prove an interesting test case.

Harrison College and KnowU

Harrison College of Indiana takes a different approach. Their new social platform, KnowU, is designed by Harrison College specifically for Harrison students. This allows the institution to integrate as much of the student and institutional information into the platform as they wish. But, of course, by limiting the application to one institution, unlike MyEdu, they limit the potential benefits that can be found in capturing data across multiple institutions.

KnowU is an ambitious project. Though still in its early stage of development, the platform will ultimately serve a range of purposes – marketing, community-building, instructional support. Of particular concern to Harrison is their growing number of online students (73% increase in the past two years). Harrison wants to provide these students with all of the tools necessary to succeed. And it is rolling out the initiative on a university-wide basis, the way only proprietary colleges with strong management seem capable of doing. (Official launch: January 2012.)

It’s interesting to remember that the original value proposition of online education within proprietary colleges was to provide adult, working students with only those parts of the college experience that they needed (or for which they had time). Proprietary schools recognized that many students didn’t need residential life, sports facilities, and the like. Traditional colleges essentially over-served them (see Clayton Christensen).

To a significant degree, these “extras” of the traditional college experience were social in nature. But over the past five or so years social media has become a key means by which people execute their social lives. Consequently, these colleges can now revisit their value proposition; they can now offer a more social experience to online students. In effect, they are putting back the social part of the college experience that their original business model removed. It will be worth watching to see how this grand effort unfolds.

Alston Road

Tag: Social media

04/21/2012