As we saw yesterday, the various new digital learning providers face a challenge of competing with traditional providers which have advantages in terms of providing students with i) fuller student experiences, ii) better-known brands and iii) widely-accepted credentials. So what are they doing to try to win this competition?

We can more or less dispense with student experience. Most new providers essentially punt on this; there’s virtually no effort among most to try to provide value in this area. That leaves brands and credentials.

The basic building block of any institutional brand is alumni. Institutions are judged by what their alumni go on to achieve; until you have alumni, nobody can judge your product. That’s true whether your institution is in cyberspace or meatspace – Quest University, for instance, has to deal with this, too. So how can a new digital provider compete? One interesting approach is that taken by Minerva University. This start-up, which recently received $25 million in venture capital funding is trying to position itself as an online Ivy League-equivalent primarily by being highly selective and limiting class sizes. Basically, Minerva is deliberately sacrificing digital education’s biggest perceived strength on both the demand side (openness) and the supply side (economies of scale) – in order to get prestige. When you have to turn your back on your medium’s greatest strengths in order to get prestige, it’s not a good sign for the industry as a whole.

MITx, seems like a good candidate to solve this problem, since in theory it can draw on existing brand equity that start-ups like Minerva can’t. However, for the moment MITx isn’t trying to issue credentials, which is a bit of a problem. And if it eventually does go that route, it won’t be using the MIT name, because – in no uncertain terms – MIT isn’t about to run the risk of having an experimental initiative screw up the stature it has developed over the last 150 years.

Leveraging the reputation of existing institutions into digital space isn’t impossible; it’s just that the risk-reward equation is terrible for top institutions. As a result, real pioneers are likely to come from a tier or two below the top. That’s why the company 2Tor, which is partnering with professional programs at institutions like Georgetown and UNC to extend the classroom experience to a wider audience, is worth watching.

To sum up, quite apart from regulatory issues, student expectations themselves form a major barrier to entry in PSE. To make a go of it, private companies need to partner with existing institutions; on their own, they simply can’t yet offer most students enough of what they’re looking for to be a viable alternative. And that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Anyone who seriously believes in the whole “Great Disruption” meme has to be able to make the case that technologically-driven change of the kinds currently on offer can actually offer an improved value proposition to higher education consumers. No one, to date, has convincingly done so.

Let’s think about this for a minute: what is it students are actually buying when they enrol in a higher education institution? Though the specific combinations will differ from one student to another, all of them to some degree are buying each of the following four benefits:

1. A credential (e.g., a B.A, or an M.Sc.). At the end of the day, people want letters after their name because they perform an important signaling function in the labour market. The letters help young people get a foot in the door in a way that skills alone often don’t.

2. A brand (e.g., a Humber B.A. or a Dalhousie M.Sc.). Education is to some extent a positional good in the way that housing is. Location matters. Older institutions tend to be more prestigious and hence command a higher price.

3. An experience. For some reason, a lot of people tend to overlook this. Being in school, for most people, is a heck of a lot of fun. I know I’d pay good money to be a student again (and do it better this time). Post-secondary education thus isn’t just an investment, it’s a consumption good as well.

4. A set of skills and competencies which are obtained over the course of gaining a credential.

Most of the arguments for a Great Disruption implicitly assume that most of what people want out of post-secondary education are the skills and competencies.  Not coincidentally, of the four benefits listed above, that happens to be the one area where digital learning has the best case to provide better value for money.

Now, presumably there are some students who really only care about the skills. For them, experiments like Sebastian Thrun’s free Stanford class do indeed constitute some kind of Great Disruption. But for everyone else, any reduction in costs provided by these new “disruptive” providers is balanced by a reduction in one or more of the other three sets of benefits. They are simply less able to deliver on credentials, brand and experience than traditional education providers.

Overcoming deficiencies in those three areas is a pretty tall order, and it’s why most of the disruption stuff is vastly overblown. But there are a number of new providers who are in various ways trying to address these gaps. We’ll see how each of them fares tomorrow.

Competency-based education is not rocket science; demonstrate mastery over a particular set of material and you get a credential. This approach is common in informal education: badges for swimming and Guides, belts for martial arts, etc. Red Seal apprenticeships also operate this way.

Formal systems of education are more leery of this approach. In K-12, it is assumed that time served is more important than demonstrated skills in moving students from one level to another. Undergraduate education in North America similarly works on a time basis, with credits being defined in terms of contact hours.

The assumption, of course, is that time spent in the classroom ultimately implies skill acquisition, and hence that time-based education is just competency-based education by approximation. It’s a convenient argument for universities; essentially, it makes their function as certifiers of skills indistinguishable from their function as providers of knowledge/instruction. And by doing so, it gives them monopoly pricing power over instruction.

But what if someone could independently certify a set of knowledge and skills and say “yeah, that’s equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree”? Figuring out how to do that in a reliable way would be a genuine disruption to universities, because it would allow competing routes to credentials. Prior Learning Assessment Recognition (PLAR) – which is widespread in colleges if not universities – uses this same kind of techniques, though usually for advanced placement rather than delivering entire diplomas. So too, as a cautionary example, do many degree mills.

Western Governors University, a public, online university based in Salt Lake City, bases its degrees around “competency-units” rather than merely time-based credits, and it’s managed to convince a number of U.S. regional accreditors of the validity of such an approach. But despite the hype, WGU has its limitations. It has done very well to boost enrolment to 30,000 in under 15 years, but it’s still basically restricted to certain forms of professional certification and upgrading in business, IT, health and education – areas where external norms are easily available as reference points. Nobody has yet worked out how this would work in basic arts or sciences, where the attitude to the very notion of defined competencies verges on hatred.

That’s why things like Tuning, which documents degree-level outcomes, and AHELO, which is attempting to measure outcomes across different universities around the world, are so important. By getting people to focus on outcomes in areas where they haven’t before, they set the stage for a massive expansion of competency-based higher education.

If you’re looking for a “great disruption,” my money’s here. It’s not glamorous, and it won’t happen quickly, if at all. But unlike recently-hyped techno-solutions, it has the virtue of being both rigorous and realistic.

Just now, there are a lot of interesting online educational experiments popping up, like Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MITx project. But there’s a huge barrier to this happening, and that barrier is credentialism.

People who focus on higher education don’t always get this, because they really care about learning. And because of this, they tend to focus on learning content rather than on the pieces of paper one gets at the end of it. But credentials matter. Ask any student – the piece of paper at the end of the road is a big, big reason most of them are there. No “great disruption” in higher education is going to occur unless it either supplants or adopts the existing credentialing system.

Some people are trying the supplanting route. Richard Vedder is touting an approach being developed jointly by StraighterLine, the Educational Testing Service and the Council for the Advancement of Education, as well as another one by the Saylor Foundation, as the most promising possibilities.

I think this is absurdly optimistic. The existing degree structure has a brand legacy going back a thousand years. Employers know what degrees are and trust them as a proxy for skills acquired. A new test, no matter how good, isn’t going to change that. If it could, a good GRE/GMAT/MCAT/LSAT score would have replaced Bachelor’s degrees a long time ago.

MITx’s founders actually have the good sense to recognize this, and are much less sensationalistic about their product than some of their boosters. When asked by the Chronicle whether MITx certificates might put some institutions out of business, Rafael Reif said:

First of all this is not a degree, this is a certificate that MITx is providing… (I)t’s a completely different educational environment… I think that for a while MITx or activities like MITx… will augment the education students get in college today. It’s not intended to replace it.

In my personal view, I think the best education that can be provided is that in a college environment. There are many things that you cannot teach very well online…. for instance… ethics and integrity and things like that.

Exactly.

So what’s left as an option for “disruption” is to use these technologies within the existing framework of courses and degrees. But that’s essentially what the Athabasca University already does (and, somewhat less salubriously, the University of Phoenix as well). All credit to Athabasca’s fine work, but it’s been around 40 years and it would be an exaggeration to call its impact “disruptive.”

Where there’s a sliver of hope for a disruptive model – maybe – is Western Governors University and its competency-based learning approach. More on that tomorrow.

Dear God, save us from Margaret Wente. Someone handed her a copy of Clayton Christensen’s new book and the rest of us got this ludicrous piece of nonsense in our Saturday paper.

This has to be the worst meme in higher education this year. I know I’ve gone off on this before, but just to re-iterate:

There. Is. No. Great. Disruption. Coming. In. Higher. Education.

Period.

Yes, there are some very interesting educational experiments going on out there. But does any of this amount to a serious challenge to universities? Does any of it make it more likely that 18- to 24-year-olds will abandon schools to go take courses online? No, because apart from some marginal techno-freaks, everyone thinks education is a social activity, which requires a much richer set of interactions than is possible online. Does it pose any challenge to research-based graduate education? No, because again, the creation of human capital involves rubbing elbows.

The new technology does make certain types of education – essentially continuing education and certain types of professional development – less costly and more convenient. And to a certain clientele (but not 18- to 24-year-olds) this matters. But this clientele is pretty marginal at most universities, so it’s hard to see why institutions would face some kind of disruptions. In fact, since this kind of education is relatively low-prestige, you can even see where some universities would be happy to punt this clientele and leave it to massive outside organizations using economies of scale to pursue a Wal-Mart education strategy.

Ask yourself this – since automation and computers do best in situations where products are generic rather than highly customized, why would anyone expect this technology to have a greater effect on the highly idiosyncratic PSE market than it does on highly standardized K-12? Outside second language learning and some intro math/stats classes, it’s hard to see which bits of traditional undergraduate degrees are standardizable and hence susceptible to this approach.

There’s one more reason this whole disruption idea is bogus. It’s because most people, at the end of the day, want credentials at least as much as they want any skills and knowledge gained from participating in education. Until these new education providers work out how to actually deliver degrees on a mass scale, I’d argue they are more of a threat to the Learning Annex than to universities.

But doesn’t MITx do that, I hear you say? No, it doesn’t. And I’ll explain why tomorrow.