Higher Education Is Stuck in the Middle Ages -- Will Universities Adapt or Die Off in Our Digital World?

By Don Tapscott, Edge. Posted June 17, 2009.

I know many bright students who feel the same way. The big thing these days is to get an "A" without ever having gone to a lecture. When the crème de la crème of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy in our educational institutions, the writing is on the wall.

A Challenge of the Revenue Model

As the model of pedagogy is challenged it's inevitable that the revenue model of universities will be too. The arrival of online education raises the question: If all that the big universities have to offer to students are lectures that you can get online for free -- from other professors -- why pay the tuition fees? If universities want to survive the arrival of free university-level education online, they need to change the way professors and students interact on campus. Some are taking bold steps to reinvent themselves, with help from the Internet. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, is offering free lecture notes, exams and videotaped lectures by MIT professors to the online world.

Anyone in the world can watch the entire series of lectures for some 30 courses, such as Walter Lewin's ever-popular introductory physics course, which gets viewed by over 40,000 people a month on OpenCourseWare, MIT's version of intellectual philanthropy. Universities worldwide have joined the movement.

A Challenge to Credentialing

Of course, universities play an important role in the sorting of individuals in society, through the admissions process and the awarding of degrees. One of the most important roles of the university is to screen human capital for future employers, and more broadly stratifying society. Those who get good marks in high school and on their SATs, who are proven to be hard workers and have other talents, get into the best universities. Those who graduate -- better still with distinction -- have a credential, to get the most desirable jobs or entrance to graduate programs. They have proven they have a degree of discipline and that they're prepared to play by the rules.

But a credential and even the prestige of a university is rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior learning environments to other alternatives their capacity to credential will surely diminish.

How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught in large class sizes by teaching assistants, largely through lectures, be able to compete in status to the small class size liberal arts colleges or superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning. Surely the proof being in the pudding will change the status for various recipes for learning.

A Challenge to the Campus

The university campus has been "a wonderful place for young people to go for four years to get older", as Princeton sociologist Marvin Dressler told me a decade ago. "While they're there they're bound to learn something" he said.

But if campuses are seen as places where learning is inferior to other models, or worse places where learning is restricted and stifled, the role of the campus experience will be undermined as well.

Campuses that embrace the new models become more effective learning environments and more desirable places. Even something as simple as online lectures do not undermine the value of on-campus education, they have enhanced it. The video lectures allow students to absorb the course content online -- whenever it's convenient -- and then get together to tinker, invent new things, or discuss the material. The experience has shown MIT that real value of what they offer is not the lecture per se, but rather the whole package -- the content tied to the human learning experience on campus, plus the certification. Universities, in other words, cannot survive on lectures alone.

Videotaping lectures can free up intellectual capital -- on the part of both professors and students -- to spend their on-campus time thinking and inquiring and challenging each other, rather than just absorbing information.

A Challenge to the Relationship of the University to Other Institutions

"The time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, our model of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest of the world," says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.

He asks a provocative question: Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending. True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around the world through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, why shouldn't a student be able to take a course from a professor at another university? Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world's greatest minds in their area of interest -- either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online. This is a beautiful example of the collaboration I described in the book I co-authored, Wikinomics.

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Don Tapscott is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank in Genera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

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