I posted last week on Organizations and Markets about the tepid,and entirely predictable, reaction of the higher education establishment to the information technology revolution. Mainline universities loudly proclaim their love of online learning — and pedagogical innovation more generally — while doing everything possible to retard it. The strategy has been to make a few easy, low-cost, conservative moves that preserve the status quo, such as putting some existing courses online, while trying to suppress the innovative outsiders like Phoenix, DeVry, TED, Kahn Academy, etc. It’s a classic example of what Clayton Christensen calls sustaining innovation — incremental changes that keep the existing market structure intact. The last thing the higher-ed establishment wants is disruptive innovation that challenges its dominant incumbent position.
As Morgan Brown wrote earlier this year, universities are guilds, and it’s this organizational structure, not bad leadership or the wrong ideology, that underlies the universities’ hostility to markets. If there is fundamental reform, it will surely come from outside the guild system, not within it. It’s great that Harvard and MIT and other elite universities are offering some classes online. But look instead to bolder experiments like the Mises Academy — not a duplicate of the standard degree program, but a modular, flexible, focused approach to teaching Austrian economics and related subjects. Call it guerrilla teaching. Let’s see where this new movement can go!
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You can see it in the faculty, too. Many classes for years have offered videotapes of lectures so that you can go over it later at your own convenience. However, many faculty speak ill about this for no good reason as far as I can tell. For students, though, this is great. Now, instead of not being able to take a class because lectures conflict, you can take both of the classes, go to one lecture, and view the other lecture sometime later. It’s very convenient, especially because you can pause the lecture to get your note-writing in. However, some professors like to cancel the recording if enough people don’t show up to the lecture. So those people who scheduled their classes in this way are left to fend for themselves without the lectures because some guy decided that people need to show up to see him speak.
The traditional university system is going to crash, thanks in no small part to financial aid.
The education guild…thought provoking concept. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the medical guild as well (AMA etc).