Follow JustinBloggers often start the New Year with predictions of what will be big news in the upcoming year. Jeff Selingo, Editorial Director for the Chronicle of Higher Education has just such a post on his blog, The New School of Thought for Higher Ed. While he restrains himself from jumping on the End of the World bandwagon that is so popular as the end of the Mayan calendar approaches, his five predictions tend to be a bit overly safe and fairly obvious: 1. Higher Ed job placement rates will be questioned, 2. Alternative certification will take off, 3. College costs will be an issue, 4. New pricing models will emerge in higher ed., and 5. Enrollments will decline.
Now, while I also don’t believe that the world will end this year, I have five slightly more risky predictions for the upcoming year that will affect the higher education landscape in 2012. Here they come:
The Mayan Pyramid at Chichen Itza
1. The Mass Extinction of Higher Education Institutions Begins – Unfortunately, the great mass extinction of higher education institutions may already have begun with a T.S. Eliot-esque whimper rather than with any sort of audible bang. A report by the U.S. Department of Education in 2009 showed that 114 non-profit, degree granting institutions were in financial distress (Blumenstyk, 2009). Since the date of that report, five of the colleges on the list closed or were absorbed by other institutions. While that is not an overwhelming number, it is indicative of the larger problem.State budget cuts, slowing enrollment (Selingo, 2012), an unsustainable model and attacks on the for-profit sector are prompting some universities to consider financial exigency, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has posted a FAQ sheet on its website informing faculty members how to deal with that unfortunate event.
The Mayans may have been wrong about the end of the world as a whole coming in 2012, but for some institutions of higher education, and their faculty, staff, and students, their failure is roughly equivalent to the end of the world. The questions to be answered in 2012 are whether or not higher education will be able to transform itself sufficiently in order to survive, or if the small ripples being felt as some institutions struggle and fail will topple the entire higher education house of cards.
2. Schools Will Begin Mandating ebooks for All Students – Spurred on by Apple’s big iBooks2 e-textbook revolutionizing announcement today, the textbook market will change forever starting right now. This announcement does for the textbook what the Internet did for news. Suddenly a “text” is not a linear, constrained, two-dimensional, snooze-inducer. Textbooks just became interactive, engaging, animated, exciting tools for learning.
After the announcement I downloaded the free sample text, E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth, which is a high school level intro to biology text. This "book" blows away any biology text that I had in high school or college by incorporating models, videos, animation, slideshows, and audio in a way that not only supports the information given in the text, but conveys whole new depths of meaning.
While the Apple announcement regarding iBooks2 was geared toward primary and secondary education, the implications for college texts are even greater. A college or university can now require the iPad for its students (or provide one for them, as the U of Kentucky does for its WIRED Residential College students) and pack an entire college career worth of learning into a single portable device. But that’s not all!
A second part of today’s announcement was the release of the free iBook Author app (for Mac OS 10.6 or higher only) that will allow authors to publish their own interactive eBooks and e-texts for free. From the announcement, it seems that this application will allow anyone with a Mac to create the same sort of robust texts that were demonstrated today. The implications for college professors are immense. Creating a custom textbook for your students just became as easy as importing a Word document and populating the resulting product with videos, images, slideshows, animations, etc. The platform is apparently simple enough for the novice, but contains the ability to add custom java or html5 widgets.
3. Accrediting Agencies Will Either Adapt or Vanish – Selingo’s prediction that this year employers will begin to consider how to evaluate and reward alternative routes to learning is right on. Coupled with this is the fact that accreditation agencies as well as universities need to adjust their thinking as to what counts as learning. There are major hurdles to be overcome in terms of determining legitimate sources of informal learning and managing the informal education process.
Accreditation agencies would be wise to get in on managing that process and teaming up with the MacArthur Foundation on their digital badges initiative and any other organized plans to acknowledge informal learning. In the same vein, universities also need to get on board with acknowledging student learning that happens beyond the ivory tower. Opening up what counts for academic credits will be one significant step in helping students rein in the cost of higher education.
4. Education Will Become a "Free For All" – Some institutions of higher learning have already realized that offering free online courses benefits everyone. MITx, MIT’s recently launched interactive learning platform will be the prototype for an explosion of high quality, free online content that will revolutionize higher education.
Efforts such as the one begun by MIT work from a radically different premise than the traditional prerequisite-based higher education model currently in use. The assumption is made in these free classes that student interest will drive their learning and that they will either self-select out of classes which are too difficult or put in the extra work to catch up. With this model, education gains a far greater audience, and it actually serves to reinvigorate what has been a stagnant environment for learning in this country. These classes will definitely lead to a more educated population that can contribute to the overall well-being of society. Look for dozens more efforts such as this one to crop up in the coming year, leading to a massive increase of free learning content and potentially giving those looking to acknowledge informal learning a place to start in their process of evaluating self-directed education.
5. Sweeping Legal Reform Will Hit Higher Education – My thought is that a second-term president with no need to appease anyone and a willingness to make tough decisions will realize that the only way to move this country back to global preeminence is through education. Laws will be passed funding colleges and universities at historic levels, thus allowing them to curb their tuition prices and open up learning to a much larger portion of the American public. In addition to this change, online learning and informal learning will be required as part of a mandatory national movement to push young people into public service as a way of preparing them for college. This program will give them practical work experience that is supplemented with targeted online learning (Marquis, 2012).
Applause Please!
There they are – five huge developments that could happen in the world of higher education in 2012. The great thing about making big, bold predictions for the future is that no one really cares unless you nail something important. So, while it is certainly possible that all of these won’t come to pass, it is fun to imagine that they might. You never know, I could hit it big and be the next Nostradamus of higher education.
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