Think of it as comparable to an all-you-can-eat menu for a flat charge. This one allows you to take as many courses you want for only 99 dollars a month. The company is StraighterLine.
Excerpt from the article:
... StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.The analytical piece in the article that I like is how such a marketplace competition might parallel the crisis in the print journalism industry, about which I have blogged earlier. The article notes:
StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.
Given the choice between paying many thousands of dollars to a traditional university for the lecture and paying a few hundred to a company like StraighterLine for a service that is more convenient and responsive to their needs, a lot of students are likely to opt for the latter—and the university will have thousands of dollars less to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.
It is one awesome, and equally challenging future of higher education that we are looking at.
What happens when the number of students making that choice reaches a critical mass? Consider the fate of the newspaper industry over the last five years. Like universities, newspapers relied on financial cross-subsidization to stay afloat, using fat profits from local advertising and classifieds to prop up money-losing news bureaus. This worked perfectly well until two things happened: the Internet made opinion and news content from around the world available for nothing, and the free online classified clearinghouse Craigslist obliterated newspapers’ bedrock revenue source, the want ads. Suddenly, people didn’t need to buy a newspaper to read news, and the papers’ ability to subsidize expensive reporting with ad revenue was crippled. The result: plummeting newspaper profits leading to a tidal wave of layoffs and bankruptcies, and the shuttering of bureaus in Washington and abroad.
Which is all the more the reason why we seriously need to figure out what higher education means, and ought to mean. If we erroneously conclude, as we have for some time now, that a four year degree is simply a matter of student successfully completing courses from a range of options, well, we have written our own death warrant.
To me, higher education has been anything but that. But, that discussion on outcomes, assessment, and capstone does not belong here. Further, I have already critiqued enough the bait and switch that colleges currently practice--the bait that a degree will get them jobs, and then the switch that higher education is all about finding oneself and that this is for the long-term.
So, I am hoping (much against hope) that challenges like this $99/month development will trigger discussions and changes in practice. But, I think I am older and wiser enough to realize that status quo will continue and one day we will become redundant and out of jobs.
BTW, how does the higher education lobby protect itself from such innovative developments? Again, from the article:
The biggest obstacle Smith faced in launching StraighterLine was a process called accreditation. Over time, colleges and universities have built sturdy walls and deep moats around their academic city-states. Students will only pay for courses that lead to college credits and universally recognized degrees. Credits and degrees can only be granted by—and students paying for college with federal grants and loans can only attend—institutions that are officially recognized by federally approved accreditors. And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they’re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online.Well, Smith is no ordinary dude--he is, after all, a Harvard grad :-) So, he worked out a way to get around this--hilarious!!!:
he devised a clever way under the accreditation wall, brokering deals whereby a handful of accredited traditional and for-profit institutions agreed to become “partner colleges” that would allow students to transfer in StraighterLine courses for credit. After the credits were accepted—laundered, a cynic might say—students could theoretically transfer them anywhere else in the higher education system. The partner colleges stood to benefit from the deal as well. They all had their own online endeavors, but those required hefty marketing investments to keep new students enrolling. The schools reasoned that the StraighterLine relationship would introduce them to potential new students, with some StraighterLine customers sticking around to take their more advanced (and expensive) courses.If you read until here, and you have no idea about Fort Hays State U: One of our own here at WOU is a distinguished alum.
One of StraighterLine’s original partner colleges was Fort Hays State University, just off I-70 in Hays, Kansas.
No comments:
Post a Comment