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.