In my last post, I argued there are three factors that will permanently drive residential colleges toward more online and hybrid programs:
- Value questions: COVID-19 may finally bring about the long-predicted “unbundling” and “rebundling” of the university. As many colleges and universities with annual price tags of $40K, $50K, or even $60K go online, students and parents alike are having their attention called to exactly what the residential experience adds and how much they are willing to pay for it. While I’m not predicting the death of the residential college, I do think we are entering a new era in terms of how students think about what they want from their college education and how much they are willing to pay for it.
- Missing the window for the traditional educational experience: While we don’t have good data yet on deferral rates, the Boston Globe reported four weeks ago that Harvard University is reporting a 20% deferral rate this year, and other numbers I’ve heard anecdotally tend to range between 10% and 20% deferrals. Not all of those students will come back, either to the university they applied to or to full-time college in general. Some will need to get jobs. Some will start their own companies. Life will move on. Their ability to invest four full-time years of their lives and $100K or more on an undergraduate education will diminish. Some will miss their window. This change, in turn, will force many colleges and universities to make permanent changes that were inevitable—though they may have felt somewhat distant—due to demographic changes, changes in the economy, and other sustainability challenges.
- Deteriorating university finances and the drive for post-traditional students: Even as fewer students may attend full-time college straight out of high school, more will need continuing education throughout their careers to stay employable or advance in their careers. This COVID-accelerated trend coincides with the COVID-accelerated trend of deteriorating university finances. Institutions will increasingly need to meet working students where they are.
These trends will likely hold true for most colleges and universities. But they will be particularly acute for many institutions that emphasize residential education. And it raises an existential question for them: Without their climbing walls and dining halls, without students being able to run into faculty on campus and have a cup of coffee with them, how will these institutions differentiate online? How can they justify their price tags?
Remember, when MIT first began giving away its course materials in its much publicized OpenCourseWare effort in 2002, the university’s primary argument for preserving the value of an MIT education was that the real value of an MIT education was being on campus with MIT professors and students. While MOOCs have brought about some evolution of that view, MIT’s edX MOOCs are largely for people who are not MIT students.
So what will distinguish an online MIT education from OpenCourseWare or an MIT MOOC micro-master’s degree in a way that will justify a substantial price premium?
Not Zoom lectures and commodity textbooks
If we compare a well-designed MOOC to a thoughtful, if hastily executed direct-translation remote learning course today, the MOOC is the superior product. Is a live faculty lecture on Zoom better than a recorded lecture in the MOOC? Eh, maybe yes or maybe no, depending on how interactive the Zoom lecture is and how well produced the MOOC lecture is. What about the asynchronous portions? The readings, formative assessments, online discussions, and just plain course organization? A well-designed MOOC offers a more seamless experience where students are guided by the interface from one experience to the next, the materials are designed to work together, and they have the distinctive flavor of a unified class prepared by the professor who designed it. In contrast, a remote learning course that was cobbled together with the tools at-hand has students hopping between the online syllabus, their commodity courseware, their LMS discussion forum (where they will have to navigate to the appropriate discussion thread), and so on.
Another way of putting this is that, if instructors had the time to more carefully design their current remote learning strategies and wire together the navigation among the various technology platforms they use, the best they could aspire to achieve is something approximating a relatively generic MOOC.
Other popular models are also either inappropriate or incomplete. The access-oriented universities have gotten very good at teaching asynchronous classes. They’ve been refining their techniques for decades. But those approaches are optimized for access and affordability, where “affordability” means “much lower tuition.” I don’t see Swarthmore or Brandeis adopting this approach unchanged as part of their core undergraduate experience. Likewise, the high-end, all-synchronous methods employed by some of the MOOC providers won’t always fit either. Sure, they work for the kind of audience that might show up for executive education. But will they work for working 20-year-olds, particularly in survey-level undergraduate courses? Maybe not. And so far we’re only talking about the in-class experience, which is a small fraction of what “residential education” is supposed to be all about.
Increasingly, colleges and universities are going to have to develop their own, distinctive approaches to online and blended learning. They will have to differentiate in different ways. And without the same kinds of person-to-person serendipitous contact that happens when everybody is physically co-located full-time, they will have to create distinctive and valuable experiences that are just as meaningful and just as easy as bumping into your professor at the coffee shop or meeting your classmates for pizza at the dining hall.
This changes everything
Such a transformation won’t happen by accident, and it certainly won’t happen by cutting 30% of staff and hoping for the best. Colleges and universities will need to re-imagine themselves. What makes them distinctive once they remove the physical campus and everything that happens because of that campus? What is special that can translate to the virtual or the blended?
The implications for governance are deep and far-reaching. A lot of the magic of the residential campus arises out of creative chaos. It’s exactly the unplanned nature of residential college—the serendipity that results from taking a life-changing course you weren’t thinking about because your friend is in it or having a deeply meaningful and entirely unplanned conversation—where the magic arises. Translating some of that into online modalities while maintaining some sort of cohesive experience will not be accidental. It must be planned. The whole university community will have to be in on it.
Nor can that cohesive experience be outsourced piecemeal to a collection of disparate vendors without much thought about the learner journey. It will longer be adequate to have a generic LMS, generic courseware, and generic web conferencing linked in bespoke configurations by individual faculty, often leaving it to the students to navigate a disjointed set of experiences that in no way resembles the easy rhythm of going to class twice a week and meeting with a study group at the library in between.
This new vision and its implementation will need to be intentional, institution-wide, and enabled through active support from everyone involved. A vague sense of appreciation among faculty and staff for the character of the institution will no longer pass for a “shared vision.” The feeling at institutions that are successful in the cultural transformation will be more like an employee-owned company than “shared governance,” where latter of often means “mutual agreement to leave everyone alone and everything as it is.”
This work is going to require new levels of collegiality and shared imagination. It will also require enormous attention to detail. When serendipity works in residential education, one reason it does so is because the student is physically surrounded by people who can help. Students are less likely to fall through the cracks when their dorm mate or classmate or advisor or professor or random student on the quad can show them how to leap over a particular crack. Online, the opposite is often true. Randomness is an enemy more often than a friend because the cues for where to go and what to do have to be consciously created, as must be the environment that encourages the formation of social support networks. There will be no more closing the door to one’s office or classroom and ignoring the parts of the university that aren’t your direct responsibility. Everyone will be in the same boat, sink or float. At the moment, everybody is just bailing out the water. But pretty soon, they will need to start rowing in the same direction with a level of shared intention that they have never practiced before.
For academics, the future of work is here. Somebody needs to tell them that.
Nice blog post Michael, thank you. When we talk about the advantages students see in attending a traditional campus-based college, it might be helpful to at least distinguish between an “elite” campus-based college and all the rest.
Back on July 11, 2020, the NYT ran an article that asked: “What’s the Value of Harvard Without a Campus?”
Here are my comments on that article along with a reference to the article:
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What’s the value of a Harvard degree if everything is online?
From my perspective, even though the pandemic is a major catastrophe, there are some silver linings. One of them is that now many smart students and their parents are starting to ask questions about elite institutions of higher education.
Now that Harvard has gone online, for the time being, in theory every student could attend their online lectures. So, Harvard is no longer limited to Harvard students. Therefore, in principle, every student could do the online homework assignments and take the online tests Harvard students take. If you are not a Harvard student, you would need to find someone at another school to grade these assignments and tests, but that seems doable. You wouldn’t be able to meeting one-on-one with Harvard faculty, but the faculty at the school you do attend could meet with you. In fact, if they don’t have to spend time preparing and delivering lectures, they would have more time to meet with you.
So, if your online education is very similar to that of Harvard students, would your degree from some other school be approximately the same. If not, why not?
This article talks mostly about the problems facing low-income Harvard students now that their school has switched to online education. Many of their problems have to do with getting access to housing, food, and health care. But, aside from these important issues, this article also talks briefly about why low-income Harvard students are feeling short-changed now that Harvard has gone online.
As it turns out, one of the important benefits of actually going to Harvard is social. As the article points out: “Life on Harvard’s campus was meant to offer students the possibility of forming relationships with well-connected peers and professors, a social environment that could multiply opportunities. Now, the experience has narrowed into what is possible through a computer screen.”
So, in some respects, the real advantages of going to Harvard is not what you’re going to learn from attending live lectures. These can be recorded and made available to everyone. No, the real advantage is not what you’ve learned in a formal setting, it’s who you get to know. For low-income students, getting to know well connected and affluent students is one of the big advantages.
Also, if you manage to get into Harvard, it means you’ve passed through their screening process. So, just being able to put “I got into Harvard!” on your resume may be almost as good as saying “I graduated from Harvard!” Of course, this is especially true if you’ve come from a low-income family, which almost eliminates the possibility that your parents have bribed someone to get you in.
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What’s the Value of Harvard Without a Campus?
Many first-generation, low-income Harvard students feel that the elite institution has failed them.
By Ezra Marcus and Jonah Engel Bromwich
July 11, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/style/harvard-students-coronavirus.html
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For all college students, including and especially those from low-income backgrounds, the coronavirus has unraveled years of hard work and extracurricular hustle. Life on Harvard’s campus was meant to offer students the possibility of forming relationships with well-connected peers and professors, a social environment that could multiply opportunities. Now, the experience has narrowed into what is possible through a computer screen.
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Excellent insight as always Michael!
I believe the shift away from on-campus to remote learning was inevitable given the ever more engaging remote connections humans can make with each other. The pandemic simply accelerated the process by a generation or so.
If, in some parallel universe, life began with the ability to have strong remote connections to each other (telepathy?), I don’t think they’d be so compelled to build massive campuses to house thousands of people together using enormous amounts of scarce resources. (Maybe for the novelty?) I’d imagine they’d find it a step backward to go out of their way to meet in person when they can connect effectively remotely.
In our universe, learning (and working) onsite was an absolute necessity until very recently; there was no viable alternative. But, I think most people would agree that _if_ there was a technology that could closely emulate an in-person meeting, it’d be a step up from having to spend many thousands of dollars to physically relocate a group of people simply to have a meeting.
I do agree that there is often magic that happens when two humans sit in the same space. But the advantage given too physical proximity is simply due to our historical lack of effective technology. The internet now allows people to connect with each other across the globe, in real-time; _that_ provides for exponentially more opportunities for magic.
Online collaboration is still in its infancy. But this pandemic is driving intense competition in the market because of the skyrocketing demand for better tools. The pandemic is accelerating R&D around remote collaboration by at least ten fold. Out of this will come a new generation of tools that will provide an amazing experience and a population that has learned to use them to satisfy our human need for community.
I don’t think students will lose support, from staff and each other, by moving online. If anything, the ability to gather data, lower the barriers to communication and collaborate asynchronously will greatly increase the support that students will have through the tough process of learning.
Universities will absolutely have to reconcile with their investment in brick, mortar and grass in the coming years. There will, of course, be an intense push to return to the status quo, but I think even after the virus is under control, this event will imprint an irreversible change in our social DNA that will be impossible to undo.
The notion that you must be on-campus and in the classroom (or in the office) to maximize your learning (or career opportunities) has been invalidated almost overnight. I’m very optimistic that this shift will unleash a great wave of opportunities in the education space.