Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Dear Commons Community,
Mark Garrett Cooper, a professor of film and media studies at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, has a fine op-ed in today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education. He reviews the disruption predictions of the past twenty years and concludes that it hasn’t happened and that our higher education is more resilient and has adjusted to all of the online technology that has been fostered upon it. Here is his introduction.
“A decade ago, acolytes of Clayton M. Christensen’s trademark “disruption” fancied that online course delivery would reduce costs and expand access, upending higher education’s traditional model. They were met with skepticism. The MOOC pitch seemed to subordinate quality to scale and profit. It underestimated the complexity of postsecondary education’s mission and the diversity of its constituencies. And MOOCs threated livelihoods. Professors recoiled at being likened to taxi drivers made obsolete by Uber (while entrepreneurs delighted in that comparison). A notable faction, with Cathy N. Davidson as its most visible champion, promoted a less macho and corporate but equally sweeping digital revolution.
For all the Sturm und Drang, the result was wide-ranging experimentation with online course delivery at both traditional institutions and ed-tech start-ups. Mid-2016 found ed-tech insiders like Phil Hill asserting that “these days, no one considers MOOCs to be the future of education or a threat to the modern university.” Yet it was also clear that online approaches were changing instruction on traditional campuses as well as in nonresidential and nondegree programs, and that they would continue to do so.
An academic suspicion of online transformation persists, but the landscape has changed. While the former allergy to all kinds of ed tech occasionally bubbles back up to the surface, read deeper and you’ll find nuanced insight into what will and won’t change. Online and hybrid approaches are now part of the mix. If your campus did not have an office to support online instruction before the pandemic, it does now. Per a 2021 EdSurge column, the age of the modern MOOC began with 300,000 learners taking free Stanford classes and grew, over a decade, to 220 million learners. A 2022 McKinsey report found consolidation in the online degree market, with large providers like Southern New Hampshire University, Liberty University, Western Governors University, and Grand Canyon University seeing major gains, while enrollments at other institutions modestly declined. Online higher ed is a growing market, but a mature one.
Cooper cites Michael D. Smith, a Carnegie Mellon professor of information technology and marketing. In a recent essay and in his new book, The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World (MIT Press), to flesh out the issues and concludes.
“For Smith the successes of Uber, Netflix, and Amazon predict the disruption of higher education (exempting the top end of the market) because those services show how networked computing can make distribution both drastically more efficient and radically more individual. He is correct that they shift expectations on content delivery. Students will expect course components that look and feel like lectures to be available anywhere, anytime. As those of us who have taught in that modality know, asynchronous delivery accommodates hangovers as well as challenging student schedules.
But the traditional college experience can stretch to accommodate those changes. For online delivery to truly “remake” higher ed, we would need to give up campus scouting trips, move-in day, parents’ weekend, homecoming, and all the rites of passage and rituals of belonging that shape campus life. I suspect that such a turn of events would not be experienced as abundance.”
Cooper makes a number of coherent important comments. However, overall enrollments in higher education have been declining for several years in part due to demographics but also due to the changing style of attaining a college degree. The majority of those who attend college today are not full-time residential undergraduate students who expect to graduate in four years. Graduate students, community college, part-time four-year college students and those enrolled in for-profit institutions are in the majority. They combine college, working full or part-time and taking care of families. For them, the online learning modality is a lifeline and it may not have “disrupted” higher education but it sure changed it. This trend will continue as newer online technologies (i.e., AI) evolve.
Tony
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