Up until recently most universities serviced a local geographical market with a tightly interdependent combination of services including teaching, research, and the authoring of learning materials. When wider markets were targeted, it was generally at the expense of local students, and without any change in teaching technique or economies of scale.
What will survive?
Online Teaching Focused Universities: If a large proportion of teaching went online, and a large portion of that went self paced, then the rise of the efficiency focused online university would seem a likely outcome. Specialist teaching universities could deliver better quality at a lower cost because they are: a) not redirecting tuition to subsidise research, b) not maintaining large physical campuses and c) not authoring their own learning materials (but rather licencing high quality materials), or running examinations.
Boutique On-campus Universities: Other universities will spruik their on-campus experience as a competitive advantage, but their fees will be relatively unattractive. Worldwide growth in student numbers may save these universities from any material loss in student numbers. They will leverage a convenient or attractive campus, large endowment funds, or significant reputations based on teaching quality or research.
Single Program University: If a university can build up enough of a reputation for expertise or research in a single program they may thrive with premium paying on-campus students, or alternately as a learning materials author or contributor.
Larger Research Institutes: The higher education research environment may rationalise somewhat if an increased teaching focus reduces cross subsidisation of research.
How this model could be explored
- In leading programs, a university could experiment with authoring quality learning materials, making them available via a publisher, a MOOC, or a learning object repository (LOR), in a collaborative manner, to achieve economies of scale, and potentially earn some revenue.
- For trailing programs, a university could experiment with the integration of learning materials from external sources (MOOC, LOR, publisher, collaboration) into courses, using materials from publishers, Learning Object Repositories (LOR) and MOOCs into courses. See if it is possible to achieve a higher quality at a lower cost for these programs.
- Experiment with outsourcing examinations and exam invigilation.
- Collaborate with employer groups to develop international quality standard for learning outcomes. This will make courses more useful and attractive to employers and therefore more useful, attractive and fair for the students who are paying the fees. If a course has community value but is not attractive to any particular employer, government subsidies can be used to protect them.
| The old way… | The changes afoot… |
| Setting learning standards | Professional bodies are increasingly setting the standards |
| Authoring learning materials | Publishers, Learning Object Repositories (LOR) and MOOC authors are producing properly designed high quality learning materials, in a way unmatched by what 10,000 unqualified instructors can each do on their own. |
| Teaching | New specialist teaching universities can deliver better quality at a lower cost because they are: - not spending tuition fees to subsidise research - using more efficient online technologies - not saddled with legacy infrastructure - they can licence better quality learning materials - can use qualified (teaching skilled) instructors |
| Provide learning environment (campus + LMS) | can be outsourced to Coursera, MOOC.org etc. |
| Examinations | can be outsourced to professional proctoring service providers. This model has been used extensively in the IT industry for many years www.proctoru.com , http://www.kryteriononline.com/ etc. |
| Research | For the universities that do research well, this may be all they do, and without tuition subsidies. They may be able to leverage their research to collaborate and get a cut from authoring learning materials. |
| Community Engagement | MOOCs reach a much larger community than any university could ever do before |
Thoughts?
Simon Collyer
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