In a commentary in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Kevin Carey finds parallels in the recent newspaper industry troubles and colleges. He sees the most vulnerable portion of higher ed the mid-tier private institutions focused on undergraduate education. Their market is focused on convenience, price, and service. And they have a growing range of alternatives offered by on-line and for-profit programs. Carey suggests that institutions that distinguish themselves by integrating technology to improve learning will survive. And points out that free course content offered by the Yales and Stanfords (safe themselves for now due to the prestige and affiliation aspects), and organized by services like Academic Earth are helping feed the competition in this market segment.
The newspaper business isn’t in trouble because people aren’t interested in news. The problem is for years they funded news writing through the lucrative print ad business. A business that is quickly dying. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise — the handwriting has been on the wall for years. But newspapers are not the first industry to fail to make the shift to a changing world. The face of higher ed will change in fundamental ways over the next 20 years. The survivors will need either luck or more likely the courage to make the hard decisions to adapt to the new paradigms.
What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers’ Decline – Chronicle.com
Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.
Finding Hope Online, and Hoping a Job Follows – NYTimes.com
Mr. Vaughn now has another activity, one aimed at breaking free of his chronically meager financial straits: He is studying for a career in medical billing through an online course he found on the Internet.
As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.
We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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