Higher education institutions, most notably universities and colleges, have traditionally been either owned by the public sector (either a country’s government or a particular state) or private, self-owning institutions. No room existed for individual investors to become involved in the ownership side, given that these institutions are typically nonprofit and thus declare no dividends to investors. However, this has changed, and an increasing number of for-profit institutions have emerged in the higher education space, particularly as a consequence of vastly improved mobile Internet technology.
Ample room now exists for new types of academic institutions. The new focus may increasingly be on blended learning, added modularity, lifelong learning, and the offering of online modules. Moreover, many of these emerging institutions have a for-profit objective. In fact, some are even actively looking for private investors, representing a growing opportunity for individual investors to become engaged. Whereas the first wave of such institutions typically tended to focus primarily on the undergraduate market segment, these institutions are now broadening their focus. Graduate and lifelong-learning segments are now becoming part of the new wave.
After several years researching the topic and obtaining firsthand experience running several respected business schools, I have prepared this three-part article on classical higher education institutions’ shortcomings, what new institutions might look like, and what this entails for investors. In this first article, I look into how institutions’ curriculums, pedagogy, and technology are holding them back. These arguments are further developed in my new book, The Business School of the Future.
Curriculum
A course’s structure is often quite rigid in classical academic institutions. The courses themselves tend to run over a semester, with a set schedule of classes per week and a well-defined set of readings. All students in a given course have the same curriculum, irrespective of their theoretical or practical backgrounds. In addition, the sequence of when to take various courses tends to be spelled out in detail. Both tendencies work to confine any particular degree to its respective area, which is typically axiomatically defined. Little room exists to combine courses from different fields (based for instance on a student’s individual interests) and thus, in essence, to design one’s own program.
It goes without saying that this curricular structure might be suboptimal today. Individual students typically would prefer to seek out what they feel might be most interesting or relevant for them. This aspiration echoes how new skill combinations are called for in today’s world. Traditional axiomatic fields may merge. New sets of competencies are called for. Thus, a need exists not only for more choice among courses from various established fields, but also entirely new courses are called for. On top of this, students might be looking to take only parts of a given course or to take a course in a more concentrated way than over a full semester. The more traditional course structures have thus to be modified with more modularization and self-combined subunits.
All of the above seems to be largely driven by the demands from modern students, including millennials, as well as from more experienced participants who might be looking for lifelong learning. Curricular rigidity might no longer be so well appreciated!
There is, of course, a counterargument to this. To achieve certain levels of competence within a given axiomatic field, more comprehensiveness and structure is often necessary. A medical doctor or a lawyer, for instance, is expected to have been exposed to a particular set of skills. Although this is true in other academic fields no reasons seems to exist for insisting on such rigid curricular structures as we commonly find.
Pedagogy
In traditional settings, higher education remains largely based on lecturing by single professors in large lecture halls. However, modern pedagogy has evolved. Much more effective ways to learn are now available! For instance, discussions of cutting-edge issues in relatively small workshop settings might be more effective. The more basic materials or aspects of a given topic might be studied at home beforehand; students would then bring their individual perspectives to the discussions, and thus all would learn not only from the professor, but from each other. In addition, the professor would learn too! He or she would have a different role in these workshop settings than the classical lecturer, becoming more a catalyst/synthesizer, quite similar to a conductor of an orchestra. We are moving toward bidirectional learning, away from teacher-centered lecturing.
Moreover, such workshops/sessions might span half to a full day and be held even on weekends to allow for more concentrated learning in a way that is more easily attainable for students who might also have jobs.
What about the physical layout of the workshop room? This may be a room with flat floor, in contrast to the typical amphitheater-style classical auditoriums. Students would be seated at round tables, so that they can see each other’s facial expressions to comprehend the gist of the discussion more fully. There might be no blackboard; rather, the professor would write on flipcharts, to be posted on the walls. In addition, the students might simply take photos of these notes using their mobile phones, and the data would go right into their laptops. Thus, the focus would be on learning, with no distractions. This method is fast and effective!
This pedagogical approach is of course not new. It is quite similar to the tutorial systems of Oxford and Cambridge. Further, this approach has even been developed for high school teaching, used in the “Harkness Table” of Phillips Exeter Academy.
Technology
We have already pointed out that distance learning has long been a reality. Mobile Internet is now part of virtually everyone’s lives, yet web-based learning typically requires a different approach than merely video-recording conventional lectures. Learning materials must be specially prepared. Students should also take tests, which allow them to check their level of understanding on their own. Further, video recordings must be done in such a way that sufficient quality exists. So, in total, preparing adequate digital learning materials requires both unique pedagogical knowledge as well as deep tech understanding.
Obviously, this also costs money. The developers of web-based learning material assume that they make a profit on their investments. This is so for more conventional academic institutions that might have entered into distance learning or new institutions that base their business models on it. Thus, a clear strategy for marketing and distribution of digitally based learning materials would be needed, and this would be entirely different from the way conventional higher education institutions recruit their students. Web-based learning requires a new business model created by the provider.
While the business model for conventional academic institutions has little room to achieve economies of scale, and basically works only by filling up auditoriums with many students or perhaps by offering several course sections with the same professors and materials, the business model for web-based learning has a definite economy-of-scale upside. Web-based learning modules may be distributed broadly.
These conclusions assume, however, that a particular web-based module would actually reach such a wide audience. The risk of failure to achieve wide acceptance is considerable, which in turn has a significant impact on the cost of any higher education offering. We shall dig deeper into these elements in the following article of this three-part series.
Reference
Lorange, P (2019), The Business School of the Future, Cambridge University Press
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