Source: eLearning Inforgrahics
Archives For Disruptive innovation
Take It From an Ex-Journalist: Adapt or Die – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Byron P. White, vice president for university engagement and chief diversity officer at Cleveland State University a shares Déjà vu moment by comparing a University senior leadership retreat where the need for innovation and change was discussed to a similar retreat discussion he had years earlier as part of the senior management of the Chicago Tribune. The fundamental challenges that were obvious to the newspaper industry a short while ago are amazingly similar to those that higher education faces now and like the newspaper industry, higher education is not listening to the demands of the general public. The following data is just one example of the gap in thinking:
A survey of 1,000 American adults and 540 senior-level administrators released last fall by Time magazine and the Carnegie Corporation of New York bears this out. While 62 percent of the administrators included “to learn to think critically” as either the most-important or second-most-important reason people should go to college, only 26 percent of the public ranked it as such. Likewise, 80 percent of the adults said that at many colleges, the education students receive is not worth what they pay for it. Only 41 percent of the administrators agreed with them.
Even though I am a staunch supporter of a liberal education even I can see that most people view education as a preparation for jobs rather than a preparation for society. Unlike White who is optimistic and posits that higher education does have the appetite for change I subscribe to Clayton Christensen’s way thinking and suggest that it will take a significant disruption to higher education before we start to see the changes that so many know are necessary.
The Future Is Now: 15 Innovations to Watch For – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
I have been monitoring innovation in education for the past 20 years and am always looking for new insights so any post, article or story that points to “innovations to watch for” catches my attention. Even before I fully read the article I did a quick look up of the author Steven Mintz to see if he had the credentials or the experience to be offering these types of predictions. He does openly warn he readers he is a
“historian and far better at interpreting the past than forecasting the future.”
In addition to being a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, Mintz is also the Executive Director for the Institute for Transformational Learning in the University of Texas System. Finally, he points to over a decades worth of teaching with technology and walks the talk with a personal website http://stevenmintz.com/ that demonstrates his belief and skill in using technology to enhance learning.
Mintz points to following 15 innovations that he suggests will alter the face of higher education over the next 36 months:
1. e-Advising
2. Evidence-based pedagogy
3. The decline of the lone-eagle teaching approach
4. Optimized class time
5. Easier educational transitions
6. Fewer large lecture classes
7. New frontiers for e-learning
8. Personalized adaptive learning
9. Increased competency-based and prior-learning credits
10. Data-driven instruction
11. Aggressive pursuit of new revenue
12. Online and low-residency degrees at flagships
13. More certificates and badges
14. Free and open textbooks
15. Public-private partnerships
Despite not being an acclaimed expert in educational technology Mintz’s predictions fall in line with the literature and research in this area and more importantly he points to changes in learning as the key disruptive innovation in 8 of his 15 predictions. He sees evidence based pedagogy not only informing instructional design but also personalized adaptive learning. He accurately places the emphasis on student-centred, competency based, well designed and collaborative constructed learning experiences as a major catalyst for change. His remaining predictions point to the disruptors of open educational resources (OER), growth of online learning and the loosening of credentialing through certification and badges and the move toward public-private partnerships.
Mintz sums up his piece with a positive challenge to faculty members to work together and:
take the lead in designing an education that will truly serve the needs of our 21st-century students.
The CITI report points to the following disruptive technologies that are poised to change the way we do business, indulge in our habits, monitor our health and entertain ourselves:
- 3-D Printing – The 3-D printing market could nearly double by 2019.
- E-cigarettes – E-cigarettes will see 50% CAG in coming years.
- Genomics And Personalized Medicine – The genomics market is already exploding.
- Mobile Payments – Mobile payments could one day be a trillion dollar market.
- Energy Exploration Technology – The shale revolution has only just begun.
- Oil To Gas Switching – CNG vehicles will continue to see robust growth abroad.
- Over The Top Content – Streaming is already nudging out regular old TV.
- The SaaS Opportunity – Everyone is going to double down on SaaS.
- Software Defined Networking – SDN is too cheap to resist.
- Solar – Solar power has almost a Moore’s-law-esque cost decline rate.
