cearta.ie

By way of follow up to my post asking How will the internet subvert campus-based higher education?, I see that Stephen King (Monash) has a similar post on The Conversation:

MOOCs will mean the death of universities? Not likely

However, within all the commentary on the rise of MOOCs, the death of the university campus has been grossly exaggerated. … MOOCs will not threaten existing university education – and are unlikely to survive – unless they adapt to the internet as a medium of delivery.

[Nevertheless] … change is inevitable … [and] universities that act early can build a reputation for innovative, high-quality teaching. … The universities that succeed in transforming education will not be those that work on a top down approach. That cannot work. Rather, it is the universities that develop the incentives and motivation for “bottom up” academic-led reform who will be tomorrow’s leaders in tertiary education.

via theconversation.edu.au

Stephen might be right that current MOOCs are not yet in a position to threaten the campus model of third level education, but I think he is rather too complacent about the threat that they pose. I agree with him that change is inevitable, but I think it will come about much sooner than he does, and I think that universities need to move much more quickly than he does.…

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I have been pondering the question in the title for some time. When I came to gather my thoughts for this post, my working title was “Will the internet affect campus-based higher education?”, but since I am convinced that it will, and that it will do so much sooner rather than later, the title quickly gathered the opening “How ..” and the verb changed from “affect” to “subvert”. My thoughts were crystallised somewhat by the following article, to which the inestimable Ninth Level Ireland drew my attention:

The Siege of Academe

For years, Silicon Valley has failed to breach the walls of higher education with disruptive technology. But the tide of battle is changing. A report from the front lines.

By Kevin Carey

… Back in the 1990s … many people confidently predicted that the Internet would render brick-and-mortar universities obsolete. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because colleges are a lot more complicated than retail bookstores. … But the defenders of the ivy-covered walls have never been more nervous about the Internet threat. In June, a panicked board of directors at the University of Virginia fired (and, after widespread outcry, rehired) their president, in part because they worried she was too slow to move Thomas Jefferson’s university into the digital world.

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