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Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher education from the Inside Out by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring

Book Notes compiled by Jane Sigford

Part One: Reframing the Higher Education Crisis

Chapter 1: The Educational Innovator’s Dilemma

Pressures from Without

• 2 year colleges—their prices increased only 1/5 as fast as those of their 4 year counterparts. Enrollments in 2-year colleges swelled as did those of rapidly proliferating for-profit higher education companies.

• University of Phoenix e.g. –revenue of $2.5 billion in 2007 and by end of 2009—nearly 3.8 billion p. 9

• Disruptive innovation [as described by Christensen] leads to better products and services. Higher ed has been different. Large universities rarely cease to operate. Nor are the prestigious ones quickly overtaken. Part of the reason is a dearth of disruptive competition.

• The most innovative would-be competitors, for-profit education companies, find great success among working adults, many of whom care more about the content and convenience of their education than the label on it.

• But many young college students still seek the assurance of traditional university names and the benefits of campus life.

• Because of loyal support from this large group of higher ed customers, the incumbents have felt little pressure from the for-profits’ use of potentially disruptive online technology

• Meanwhile the terms of competition among traditional institutions, the public and private not-for-profit universities, have been set primarily by those at the top. The strategy of most schools is one of imitation, not innovation.

• Little-known and smaller institutions try to move up in the ranks by adding students, majors, and graduate programs, so as to look more like the large universities

• They also task their faculty with research responsibilities and then incur new costs and thus must raise tuition which blunts the price advantage they began with. P. 11

Educational Innovator’s Dilemma

• Institutions that emulate Harvard and strive to climb the Carnegie ladder are doing just as conventional business logic dictates—trying to give customers what they want. P. 12

• Great universities such as Harvard inspire not just administrators, faculty, and alumni—they also excite the most elite prospective students

• Result of competition-by-imitation is to solidify past educational practice among traditional universities, making them increasingly more expensive but not fundamentally better from a learning standpoint.

• Only the costs of a higher ed have kept pace with times—in 10 years after 1997, inflation-adjusted cost of a year of college at the average public university rose by 30% while earning power of bachelor’s degree remained roughly the same. P. 13.

• Cost increases derive partly from higher salaries, but more from activities unrelated to classroom instruction—scientific research, competitive athletics, and student amenities require large operating outlays and construction of high-tech labs, stadia, and activity centers. These enhancements are sustaining innovations rather than reinventions; the product becomes better while its basic design and uses remain the same.

• The catch is that performance enhancements at some point exceed even the most demanding customers’ performance needs.

• To cover cost of new offerings and actives, they raise tuition. Thanks o gov’t grants and loans, the students are less price sensitive in their higher ed choices than in other purchase decisions. P. 14

Risk of Disruption

• Much of what univ. are doing is std. mgmt, practice: improve the product; give customers more of what they want; watch the competition. But it leads even great enterprises to fail, as detailed in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

• Inevitably, while industry leaders focus on serving their most prized customers and matching their toughest competitors, they overlook what is happening beneath them. One is that there is growth in the # of would-be consumers who cannot afford the continuously enhanced offerings and thus become nonconsumers.

• Also there is the emergence of technologies that will, in the right hands, allow new competitors to serve this disenfranchised group of nonconsumers.

• In most industries the pattern of sustaining innovation is broken by a disruptive technology.

• Historically, higher ed has avoided such competitive disruption for several reasons—power of prestige in higher ed marketplace—because inst. Has been admired in the past, they are presumed to be best choice for future. P. 17

• Also process of accreditation has tended to apply the standards of practice as determined by the elite colleges, particularly Harvard.

• There has also been a lack of disruptive technology—lectures, textbooks, oral and written examinations have remained largely the same until recent emergence of Internet and computer technologies.

• Online learning is now a disruptive technology

• For vast majority of universities, change is inevitable. The main questions are when it will occur and what forces will bring it about. P. 19

• Am. Higher ed has largely regulated itself, to great effect. U.S. universities are among the most lightly regulated by gov’t. They are free to choose what discoveries to pursue and what subj to teach, without concern for economic or political agendas. This freedom is a great intellectual and competitive advantage. P. 19

The DNA of the University

• Prominent among the elites are Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and MIT—they have evolved to share common institutional traits, a sort of university DNA

• As a result, even smallest and most obscure universities bear many of the essential traits of the great ones. Because it has evolved over hundreds of years.

Bigger and Better

• Through mutually reinforcing formal and informal systems, the university continually demands bigger and better.

• Though the Carnegie classification system supercharges this tendency, it is by no means unique to higher ed. Most established organizations, including for-profit companies, readily adopt new technologies that show potential for enhancing their size and standing. P. 2

Part Two: Great American University

Harvard led the way in many of the ideas that we envision and aspire to as higher ed.

• Modeled program after Oxford, except it was a religious enterprise and was meant to instill moral character.

• Was entirely student focused—had and still has house tutors who lived with students and taught them on individualized basis

• Had set curriculum, no matter area of interest

• In 1700s began system of expert professor and college lecture and students taking notes.

• Instructors were often trained in Germany, then the scholarship capital of the world.

• In 1825 for the first time students were allowed to choose a subject, In place of part of Latin and Greek requirements, they could opt for French, Italian, German, or Spanish.

• Also control of the curriculum was turned over to faculty departments.

• In 1800s also introduced grades and a long summer vacation. P. 41

• Recitation, the rote restatement of reading and lecture material remained as dominant pedagogy. P. 41. Greek was required for graduation and admission.

• Harvard College changed little more in 19th century than it had in 18th. P. 41.

• During early 1800s professional schools were established in medicine, divinity, law, science, and dentistry. At this time professional schools did not require completion of college degree first.

• Began emphasis on scholarship as selection criteria.

• Began fundraising

• Began to: secularize, specialize in subject matter, create departments,

• By 1860s Harvard was poised for renaissance.

Chapter 3: Charles Eliot, Father of American Higher Ed.

• Charles Eliot father of Am. Higher ed. He substituted oral exams with written ones and created Harvard’s 1st lab based course in 1850s.

• Wanted American universities to do 3 things: 1) excel in all academic disciplines, 2) contribute to social and economic welfare, 3) provide freedom of choice. P. 49

• Began “elective system” Rather than mandating a standard, classical curriculum for undergraduates professors would be allowed to choose what to teach. P. 51.

• Students could take advanced courses as soon as they thought they were ready.

• When Harvard’s elective system came into full flower, the typical college specified 80% of a student’s courses. Little more than a decade later, the figure was down to 30%. P. 55

Everything at its Best: Harvard Graduate Schools

• Eliot created new graduate schools to recognize goals of world-class scholarship and contribute to economic prosperity and social welfare.

• Created new professional schools, including agriculture and horticulture, veterinary medicine, mining and geology, and business. Only the Harvard Business School survived as a stand-alone entity. P. 57 He upgraded medical and law schools which prior to his tenure had not required bachelor’s degree or rigorous examination. P. 57.

Faculty Prerogatives and Influence

• He created the most intelligent and fair-minded body of men in the world for his purposes. P. 60

Student Freedom

• Eliot believed academic freedom applied not just to professors, but to students, p. 60

• He reduced behavioral requirements including attendance at chapel. Student behavior degenerated. P. 61

Influence on Secondary Education

• Eliot affected secondary education because he thought Harvard needed a set of educational standards to which all of the nation’s leading secondary schools would adhere. He chaired NEA’s Committee of Ten to adopt his fourfold classification of elementary knowledge—language, history, mathematics, and natural science.

• He also contributed to founding of the College Entrance Examination board which would later administer the SAT. p. 64

• His goal was to make all public high schools capable of producing college-ready graduates. This is still seen in DNA of American high schools today. –emphasis on “mental training” rather than vocational preparation.

• Many public hs struggle to perform either well—We have seen declining earning power of hs degree and decreasing percentage of hs students who enter and complete college. P. 65

Eliot’s Innovative Influence

• Added graduate schools on top of college and introduced elective system

• More faculty autonomy

• Added tenure system

• [Chart p. 69-70]

Chapter 5: Revitalizing Harvard College

New President—Abbott Lawrence Lowell

• Borrowed from German universities to emphasize graduate education, diverse fields of inquiry, and discovery scholarship. P. 83.

• Created college dormitories that had scholars resident in the living quarters to “teach” the students—required freshman to live in dorms to create community atmosphere and foster interaction among those with differing backgrounds. The system of comingled living and learning was copied only by a few other institutions, mostly elite private colleges that could afford the high financial cost.

• Also created “honors” designations

• Wanted to assure educational breadth and depth, and promote academic excellence. P. 84

• Created combination of distributions and concentrations recognized as general education courses and declared majors.

• Offered community courses to community members which had already been established at University of Chicago.

• However, and it still is, that undergraduate tuition often subsidizes scholarship. P. 91.

• He created the grading curve. And cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. The A replace the C as the “gentleman’s grade.”

• He articulated a broad definition of academic freedom. P. 94. Professors should share their expertise outside of the classroom.

• He finalized the essential DNA of undergraduate education by grading curves, honors designations, general education and majors.

• Gave professors a semester free of teaching to do research. Added academic calendar for additional time for research

Chapter 7: The Drive for Excellence

Charles Eliot had established institutional structure which mingled graduate students with undergraduate. He also broadened curriculum to include all academic subjects. Lowell brought rationality to university’s choice of students and subjects. Yet the matter of scholarly excellence was up to Lowell’s successor to attend to. James Bryant Conant was first world-renowned scholar to lead Harvard beginning 1933. P. 110

• The Harvard of Eliot and Lowell were, for all its strengths, clubby and inbred. P. 112.

• Conant—“up and out tenure” was his addition Professors had 8 years to demonstrate their worthiness for tenure

• It widened gulf between haves and have-nots on faculty.

Tenure system tended to skew the efforts of tenure-track faculty toward scholarship and away from teaching. [This still exits. NOTE MINE]

• Tenure system with emphasis on finding world premier scholars, made Harvard’s curriculum core specialized and graduate-student focused. Specialty offerings proliferated. Therefore many offerings operated at less-than-economical levels. P. 116.

Merit-based Admission

• Conant changed admission policies to broaden the acceptance pool. Prior to this 2/3 of applicants had been from home state. He increased reliance on SAT to gather students from wider pool. He eventually left Harvard and went to work for ETS.

• Using SAT narrowed types of students accepted to only the brightest and best prepared. P. 118

Harvard during WWII

• Women admitted for the first time—included women from its sister institution, Radcliffe, proved lasting. It would be 20 years before female students received Harvard diplomas, and almost thirty before they took up normal residence on the campus, but the door had been opened.

• Also received boost from GI Bill which brought flood of applicants p. 120

Rise of Gov’t Funded Research

• War brought increase in gov’t funded research contracts that were very lucrative. Harvard scientists made valuable contributions to military communications and to the development of radar, napalm, and the atomic bomb.

• War’s end brought decrease in gov’t-funded research but its role in the university was established. Size and number of contracts and grants would grow with the coming of the Cold War

• However, faculty and administrative time was taken up in grant writing and regulatory compliance. Made it more difficult for some professors to carve out time for teaching. P. 122

Redbook

• 12 well-educated scholars created a 267-page volume nicknamed the Redbook that stated the fundamental purpose of education is to promote freedom. It also stated the importance of values. It created a new general education program that was required for 1/3 of their program where students had to have at least one course in each of three areas: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The Redbook improved general education for a generation of students not only at Harvard but the courses were somewhat difficult to teach because they spanned traditional disciplines and because of the high student-teacher ratios.

• Its most lasting impact was on hs courses which was its primary focus.

• They derided the value of hs “vocational and trade courses, regarded as inferior, made up of inferior students, and taught by inferior teachers. Reasoned students going straight from hs to work should pursue liberal studies. Authors felt all students should study a foreign language, ideally Latin or French. Art should be studied by all.

• To this day their prescriptions are reflected in hs curriculum and presume that students headed directly to work could prepare sufficiently via the mere one-third of the curriculum that is not consumed by general ed. Ironically, a general education curriculum that was too rigid and too difficult to deliver for Harvard students and faculty became the standard for American high schools. P. 127

The Ivy Agreement

• In postwar years Harvard ended big time football. It had created the rules of college football and created what would become the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). P. 128 They also adopted the new forward pass to revolutionize the game.

• Harvard joined 7 sister institutions—Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale to hold all students to common academic standards and offer no athletic scholarships and to participate in no postseason games. In addition, prof. participation in any sport by a student-athlete would preclude collegiate participation in all sports.

• These strictures effectively meant the end of nationally competitive football. With football expenses under control, there was more money for other sports. Intramural athletic participation, which had doubled with the creation of the house system, became an even stronger tradition. By 1979 ¾ of Harvard undergrads would be participating in intramurals.

• Conant made Harvard’s scholarship nationally relevant as never before. P. 131

Essential Genetic Structure

• The overlay of German-style graduate schools and research objectives on an undergraduate college naturally tends to draw senior faculty away from undergraduate teaching; their focus shifts to scholarship and to working with graduate students, leaving the younger students in the hands of less experienced instructors. P. 131.

• Having long summer breaks with empty buildings is costly. It is also costly to maintain intercollegiate athletic facilities that sit idle much of the time.

• One of the decisions that was fateful even to this day is the creation of a pedagogy that presumes face-to-face interaction between teacher and student

• Another is the gradual abandonment of early Harvard College’s blend of rationality and moral values.

Harvard’s Advantages

• Harvard undergrad can experience the best of both the German research university and English college.

• Harvard’s ability to draw gifted students and, as necessary, pay for their education, creates tremendous opportunities for learning from one’s fellows. P. 135 [Great chart of advantages, p. 136-7 NOTE MINE]

• They made 2 important decisions that most other schools have not. 1) Restrict intercollegiate athletic competition. 2) Which is actually more valuable to its students, the standard time-to-graduation for a Harvard College student is still four years. That compares to a nat’l average closer to five. Undoubtedly, part of the difference lies in Harvard’s students’ superior academic ability, their full-time focus on their studies, and the financial incentive to move quickly inherent in the College’s high tuition rate. There is also a strong desire to graduate “with my class.” P. 136

• Harvard also provides more student advising and has made 4-year graduation more feasible by constraining the growth of its concentration requirements or majors. Failure to do that elsewhere has become epidemic.

Costs of Harvard DNA

• In spite of uncommon advantages, burdens of institutional DNA have proven increasingly difficult even for Harvard to bear. Successors of Conant have found they had limited capacity to influence the university, let alone to innovate as he and his predecessors had done. P. 138

Chapter 9: Harvard’s Growing Power and Profile

• In the late 50s and early 60s enrollment grew to 1500 per class and socioeconomic diversity was introduced

• Operational complexity and cost expanded in spite of the very healthy endowment fund enjoyed by Harvard.

• It was increasingly difficult to compete for star scholar [faculty] without promising light teaching loads. In the sciences in medicine, faculty effectively paid their own way with research grants but didn’t teach much. Faculty were winning Nobel Prizes but didn’t want to teach, particularly the introductory courses.

• In 1960s Harvard undergrad was a relatively wealthy, white, religious male and would concentrate on liberal arts and plan to go to graduate school. He was conservative in his life outside of school.

• 10 years later the typical student was still male, white, and wealthy but everything else had changed. He was less religious and less interested in being taught the kind of values espoused by the Redbook. Admission rates had fallen. Thanks to grade inflation, he was twice as likely to make the dean’s list, an honor shared by 80% of classmates.

• Outside of class, he set his own standards. He lived in a different political environment and adopted a liberal view of social issues such as Vietnam, race relations, and demonstrations at Berkeley.

Part 3: Ripe for Disruption

Chapter 11: The Weight of the DNA

• In 1960s Harvard made progress on gender and racial diversity, allowing Harvard to recruit minority and female professors and students without lowering standards of merit. President Bok raised # of female undergraduates by 50%. He also oversaw the adoption of gender-blind financial aid policies and concluded a merger agreement with Radcliffe College.

• Also 60% of the students were engaged in some form of public service. Both undergraduates and students in the prof. schools were caring more in the classroom about ethics and personal conduct. P. 173

• However, there were still pay differentials that reinforced the primacy of research and publication over other forms of contribution.

• He was concerned about the quality of teaching for undergrads, because increasingly the senior faculty avoided teaching undergrads.

• Having professors travel to do speaking and research was also a drain on the educational aspects and financial status of the university.

• The resources and activities required to produce world-class scholarly research bear little resemblance to those necessary for teaching undergrads at an affordable cost. The same faculty can, if so directed, perform both functions. But a first-rate scholar is a tremendously expensive teacher. Moreover, the departmentalization of the university, though it serves the needs of scholars well, tends to produce narrow curriculum; it also leads to high coordination costs in extra-departmental activities, such as the creation of gen’l ed programs. Absent countervailing investments in residential houses, tutors, and specially funded curr. Dev. projects such as those Harvard makes, the result is an undergraduate learning experience of a quality not justified by its high cost. P. 181

• Information technology did little to increase the instructional productivity of the faculty until recently.

Chapter 12: Even at Harvard

• In 2007 there was a proposal for a new gen’l ed curr. Requiring students to take at least 1 course in each of 8 subject areas—2 of those addressed the sciences, and 2 others issues of globalization.

• However, Harvard’s huge endowment dropped by $11 billion with the market downturn in the mid-2000s.

• Harvard and other elite private universities are rebounding because the power of educational brands such as Yale and MIT and Williams will insulate the elite private schools at least from economic pressure. However, other schools including some top-tier public research universities have bigger problems. P. 191

Chapter 13: Vulnerable Institutions

• In early 2010 Univ. of California, part of what has been called “the greatest system of public lrng the world has ever seen,” was in dire straits. Its flagship Berkeley campus modeled after Harvard, faced a $1,2 billion gap in state funding for 2010-11 school year.

• Though Berkeley is likely to rebound, the future of many of CA’s other public universities is less certain. The genius of the CA higher ed system as designed by Kerr in the 1960s was that it was integrated, while keeping distinct, three different types of institutions: research universities, teaching universities, and community colleges. Through Kerr’s plan the brightest 1/8 of CA’ s high school graduates were guaranteed a slot at a U of C campus such as Berkeley or UCLA. Graduates in the top 1/3 of their classes could go to one of the state universities, which lacked Ph.D. programs and were thus more focused on undergraduate instruction. All hs grads could attend a community college, with the promise, contingent on performance, of transferring to a state university. P. 194

• To its great credit, the CA system gave every hs grad a reasonable shot at a college degree while keeping the costs of scholarly research and grad. Programs limited to a relatively small number of U of C campuses (initially 8, 10 as of 2010). At all 10 instructional cost-per-student reflects the high price of giving professors time away form the undergraduate classroom for research and graduate instruction.

• The burning question highlighted by 2008’s downturn is not whether the great research universities, such as Berkeley and UCLA and Harvard, are cost-justified, but whether the less powerful ones, which comprise the vast majority, can continue as they have in the past. The schools most at risk are the more than 700 public and not-for-profit universities that grant graduate degrees but are not among the 200 elite research institutions identified by the Carnegie Foundation, the accepted arbiter of academic standing. P. 195

• It’s the community colleges, comprehensive public universities, and private colleges without national reputations—schools that enroll 95% of the 19 million students attending accredited institutions across the country—that may be the most vulnerable.

• 2nd and 3rd tier schools overlooked by the nat’l media are little known except to those enrolled there or living nearby. They lack the power of large private endowments and prestige needed to command high tuition rates. Yet their costs are structurally similar to those of Harvard to the extent that they have pursued its bigger-and-better strategy. Their classrooms and other expensive physical facilities sit idle through long summer breaks. Their tenure-track faculty split time between research and teaching, effectively reducing their capacity to generate tuition revenue and increasing the institutions’ org. complexity and coordination costs, p. 195

• The lesser-known schools compete among themselves, Harvard-style for blue-chip scholars and students. Many also engage in expensive competitive efforts that Harvard does not. Intercollegiate athletics, a money-losing activity for all but a few of the largest universities, is the most visible example. Others include public relations campaigns to boost the university’s image, along with outsized scholarships for a relative small percentage of students whose high SAT scores help in college-rankings battle. P. 196

• The costs of climbing the Carnegie ladder are great because there is the risk that things easily measured secondhand, such as research funding, degrees granted, breadth of curricular offerings, and student selectivity, crowd out important intangibles, such as measuring the quality of what institutions do, as opposed to the mere quantity of it. Thus, though moving up the ladder is inevitably expensive, given the costs of scholarly research and granting advanced degrees, it may or may not produce greater value to students and society. P. 197

• Undergraduate students encounter more lectures than interactive learning experiences, more part-time and graduate student instructors than tenured professors. The courses students take often lack clear connections to one another, to practical uses outside of the academy, or to enduring values.

• In emulating the research university model, the trend-followers adopt policies and practices that provide de facto answers to a university’s 3 most important strategic questions 1) What students will we serve? 2) What subject matter will we emphasize? And 3) What types of scholarship will we pursue? For these emulators, the answers become 1) graduate students and elite undergraduates over ordinary college students 2) myriad academic subjects rather than a focused set of practical ones, and 3) discovery research scholarship over more practical forms, such as showing how the discovers of others apply to practical problems or how they can be best taught to students. P. 198

• That preferred model is not only embodied in the Carnegie ladder and the elite research universities themselves but also encouraged by the standards of accrediting organizations, academic professional associations, publishers of university rankings, and philanthropic organizations. According to this model, getting better means what it did to Charles Eliot—having everything at its academic best. Applied training is dropped in favor of a broad range of scholarly disciplines. Graduate programs are created both to enhance prestige and to provide student assistants for research and teaching support. Faculty get time for research and are rewarded with tenure for doing it well. Full-time professors have doctoral degrees, and salaries are high enough to allow recruitment and retention of scholarly stars. P. 198

• In this model, size also matters. Climbing the Carnegie ladder requires granting more bachelor’s master’s and doctoral degrees. Many states’ funding schemes reward student body growth. For small schools, adding students also creates financial economics of scale. Bigger schools can also field stronger athletic teams, a favored cause of students and alumni and a powerful public relations tool. P. 199

• Trying to emulate Harvard has left many schools overstretched and underfunded. Tuition revenues may grow via the admission of more students and price increases but the newly promoted schools lack the prestige to charge anything like Harvard and the elites. In fact, tuition increases sometimes prove the worst of both worlds—insufficient to cover new expenses but enough to drive some students to lower-cost alternatives.

• Growth may be catch 22. Growth in the number of majors offered, a bigger-and-better tendency that Harvard has avoided but few of its emulators do, means that the larger student body is divided up into small, expensive-to-teach groups.

• In fact, the per-student cost of teaching can increase due to university-level standards for scholarly research and the associated reduced teaching loads. Tenure-track professors teach fewer courses, by half of more, than do their community college counterparts.

• At ladder-climbing institutions, teaching professors risk becoming second-class citizens, though they may shoulder more than their share of the teaching load. P. 201

Elusive Prestige

• Elite research univ. continue to win a disproportionate share of article acceptances in the most prestigious academic journals. As more university professors submit papers to a largely fixed number of A-list periodicals, the individual success rate falls. Plus, there are a growing number of international scholars. [How will internet access change this? We no longer have to wait for research to be peer-reviewed. In fact, some people put their research on the internet and others contribute to it. This may change the whole definition of publication. NOTE MINE]

• Athletic competition likewise yields disappointing returns for most universities. Smaller school find themselves joining conferences spread out across half a continent or more. Athletic budgets swell not only with rising airfares but also with increased spending on scholarships and facilities. Financially beleaguered schools that propose cutting football, the most expensive program, typically face howls of protests from boosters and back down. Some add football teams, thinking that increased alumni interest and support will cover the cost. P. 202

• Since late 1980s college tuition and fees have risen 440 %, four times faster than inflation. Plus only 35% of students nationwide finish in 4 years. In fact, only 55% graduate within 6 years of starting college. Those who do earn bachelor’s degrees have a less than 1/3 chance of being deemed verbally and quantitatively literate, a percentage that is failing. P.203

• There is also a problem in trying to imitate. Even universities that can afford to compete Harvard-style must wrangle over the same limited pool of extraordinary students and scholars. College education gets more expensive, but it does not get better. P. 203

• Traditional universities have let their focus on the most elite students take them beyond the needs and preferences of ordinary ones. Ordinary students are of 3 types: 1) one paying more than he or she would like for trad. University campus experience. 2) Educationally qualified nonconsumer, a would-be student who cannot afford to attend a trad. University but would embrace a less expensive alternative. 3) Potential student who lacks educational background to succeed in typical university but might make it with special help. P. 205

Chapter 14: Disruptive Competition

• For most universities 2009 and 2010 were difficult years.

• Accreditation is no longer the challenging barrier to online education innovators it once was.

• The technology has matured and there are more professionally trained designing better courses with more uniformity among teachers.

• Accreditation has become more focused on learning outcomes and more accepting of online delivery.

• Online technology allows student to learn at their own pace and to have a competency-based approach to learning [as opposed to seat time NOTE MINE]

Disruptive Innovation

• On 2 other dimensions—technology and wealth—current trends favor online educators, particularly the for-profit ones.

• Increasing speed of Internet communication has been mirrored by enhancements in online instruction technology; online course are getting demonstrably better, now equaling or exceeding the cognitive outcomes of classroom instruction.

• At same time economic downturn has forced cost cutting at traditional universities has given the financial edge to the for-profit educators many of which have strong balance sheets and access to the capital markets. P. 212.

• University of Phoenix has been among the leader. Has standardized courses focused on learning outcomes, year-round operation, and programs for faculty training and development. [Plus many online programs including U of Phoenix have made a lot of $ in offering programs to returning veterans using the GI Bill. However, many of the enrollees haven’t finished the programs and end up in debt but U of Phoenix has gotten the money from the gov’t. This information was on a podcast I heard a year ago. NOTE MINE] U of Phoenix also has a new platform that infers the ways that the student learns best, based on his or her interactions with course materials so it can make recommendations to both student and instructor about the types of content and the instructional strategies that are likely to work best.

• Online educators also enjoy access to a growing body of skilled instructors who know how to make the most of the medium, in terms of both learning quality and serving many students at once. The overproduction of master’s degreed and Ph.D. holders from traditional universities have created a pool of qualified online instructors who are willing to work for a few thousand dollars per course.

• In contrast, a tenured professor who teachers 4 or 5 courses per year and has no outside research funding may cost 10 times that amount on a per course basis.

• Adjunct instructors give online educators 2 other advantages: 1) paid by course so can match supply and demand. 2) Online educator’s performance is easily monitored and underperformers have no contractual rights. Also have lower physical plant costs.

• For-profit online educators operate year-round, avoiding cost of long summer recess. Offer fewer majors and courses focusing on those in greatest demand. Can admit all fully qualified candidates, and evaluate based on learning outcome achievement—not on forced curve. Plus, there are no expensive athletic teams.

• Online programs, of course do have shortcomings too. P. 216 In DeVry for example, risk of failure to finish is great because many students are working adults with heavy out-of-school responsibilities; many come from economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. DeVry’s bachelor’s degree-seeking students graduate at a rate below the nat’l average yet the cost of conferring a bachelor’s degree, even accounting for those who do not graduate is $40, 128 compared with a peer average of $74,268.

Part Four: A New Kind of University

Chapter 17 Raising Quality

• One innovation at BYI-Idaho is to create a new academic calendar with a true third semester—Using adjuncts for summer, thus decreasing costs of maintaining physical facilities, allows more revenues. Results of a summer program are mixed.

• Another innovation was to teach via case study and problem, integrating disciplines. They use experienced faculty to create the case studies which creates collaboration and investment in the quality of the courses. It also allows an interdisciplinary study to engage more students. Instructors are responsible for content and for ensuring student learning. p, 259

• Changing the general ed program is also important. President of BYU-Idaho recognized that there was too much breadth in choice of courses and lack of integration which robs the program of its intellectual and social value. For many students, GE requirements are hurdles on the way to more focused and engaging major offerings. For faculty, they can be exercises in educational mass production preferably delegated to grad assistants and adjuncts.

• Clark at BYU-Idaho wanted to create a gen’l ed program capturing not only the science and globalization content but also common courses that have cross-disciplinary perspectives and the moral values called for by the Redbook.

• Having experienced faculty design the courses increased faculty collaboration. It had dual benefit of disseminating best practice and also educating less experienced faculty in the art and science of teaching. System particularly powerful for new faculty members who learn from the more seasoned staff. P. 265

• The GE curriculum became 1/3 of the grad requirements taking courses in 9 subject areas: English, math, science, American history and gov’t international affairs, humanities, family relations, religion, and analytical thinking and moral judgment. [This was at BYU-Idaho., NOTE MINE]

• Outside of the classroom to raise quality: more student advising so that students can graduate effectively in 4 years. P. 271

Chapter 18: Lowering Cost

• One idea is to have students mentor other students—providing intellectual and personal support.

• Some students take some blended courses so that the cost can be lowered and yet have some of the richness of face-to-face courses.

• One college was Arizona’s Rio Salado. Students, mostly working adults, can choose from more than 500 online and hybrid courses and 40-degree programs. A “block calendar” offers 48 start dates each year, with a combination of 16 week and 8-week courses, an automated learning mgmt system too. The emphasis on centrally developed online courses and part-time faculty keeps its costs relatively low.

• With online courses, qualified adjuncts can be from around the world.

• On average, online courses nearly matched face-to-face offerings in student satisfaction and measurable learning outcomes. Significantly the distribution of results was tighter: the best online courses couldn’t match the best face-to-face experience, but the lowest-rated online course was better than the poorest of what was occurring the classroom; the constant correcting and culling of low-performing online instructors meant that the “lower tail” of the online performance distribution was relatively short. Internal data from BYU trusted that the average quality of the online courses would steadily improve through innovation, as predicted of new technologies in The innovator’s Dilemma. P. 286

• In fact, the expansion of online learning which allows many more students to access college education and thus increases the overall demand for instruction, creates valuable new roles for full-times on campus. The most obvious need is for online course development: the best courses are the combined product of instructional designers and faculty subject matter experts. In addition these experts may also add content modules that include video clips of their own lectures, effectively becoming course leads. P. 287

Graduation Delays

• Delays are not usually caused by total credit requirements, but the credit requirements for majors which are determined by the sponsoring department. This requirement operates independently from the total requirement number.

• Students often change their mind about their major and often finds that the courses don’t transfer to the new major. This is often the cause of a delay of graduation. Only 65% of US students graduate in 4 years.

• The number of requirements tends to grow because of the educational background of university faculty. PhD-trained professors naturally want those students who aspire to following in their professional footsteps to succeed in graduate programs. [Are we always preparing students for the next thing? In middle school we say we are preparing students for hs. In hs we say we are preparing them for college. In college we are preparing for graduate school. Maybe this thinking should change. NOTE MINE]

• This increase of requirement can lead to over-engineering of the major—producing a college degree of potentially higher quality but at too high a price to the student. P. 291

• One way to counteract the creeping major is increasing the amount and quality of student advising. P. 293 and scaling back the major requirements.

Chapter 19: serving more students

Great chart on p. 308 of innovations of the Kim Clark Era, at BYU-Idaho.

• One innovation is create certificates and associate’s degrees to accelerate the modularization of the 4-year curriculum for on-campus students. Can prepare students for viable careers, not creating 4-year degree without job opportunity. P. 317

Part Five: Genetic Reengineering

New messages for hs students:

1. Instead of taking hyper-competitive AP courses and not-so-valuable electives, why not earn real college credit before hs graduation. Start college degree now with online courses [or with post-secondary enrollment which pioneered in Minnesota 20 years ago. NOTE MINE]

2. When you graduate, you have options, which include living at home and taking online courses, or attending a university partly online but that has a study center near your home for some face-to-face, or taking face-to-face

3. Can come to traditional campuses

4. Can be a mixture of programs which you can customize.

5. Can design a degree that will help with employability

6. Some degrees are modular so you can change majors without “starting over”

7. Can graduate without a mountain of debt. Online resources are cheaper than textbooks as one cost saving

Transcending the Dichotomy

• Universities are likely to use a blended approach of online and face-to-face

• The key is to embrace learning advantages of each.

• Technology is improving so much to create simulated experiences, such as lab experiences that are increasing the options.

• Teaching performance in online is easily monitored and improving.

• The university professor whose advancement depends on research faces a challenge.

• Real advantage of traditional universities though, is their ability to meld online and face-to-face learning experiences. Face-to-face learning goes beyond formal classroom instruction; it includes the important informal learning that comes when students interact with one another in campus activities. The combination of online technology and the college campus has the potential to take traditional universities to new levels. P. 330

• 3 trends feel particularly intimidating. 1) Increasing economic competition 2) knowledge seems impossible to wring from a surging sea of data, 3) social relationships are becoming more complex. The digital world is simultaneously more connected and more fragmented and impersonal. P. 331.

• 3 vital jobs to be done by universities 1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, 2) remembering and recalling the achievements and failures of the past, and 3) mentoring the new generation. P. 331

• In the face of today’s wrenching economic and social pressures it is natural for not only marketers of higher ed but also customers to become myopic. The job that students and policymakers need done is the bestowal of the insights and skills necessary not to just make a living but to make the most of life. A college degree cerates its significant wage earning advantage because it is designed with more than rare economic goals in mind. Among those extra-economic goals are the jobs of discover, memory, and mentoring, jobs that traditional colleges and universities perform as few other institutions can. P. 332

What universities do best:

1. Discovery—

2. Memory—exposes students to broad range of disciplines with emphasis on the historical development of those discipline. P. 334.

3. Mentorship—Students learn a lot from tutors, in case of Harvard, and other educated persons, in the case of other universities. P. 335

• The vulnerability for universities lies not so much in their growing costs but in their relative performance of these jobs. Gov’t agencies and corporations are still willing to fund productive university research. Taxpayers and legislators appreciate, at a reasonable cost, the social benefits of the university’s memory. Many students and their parents are willing to pay a premium price for a university experience with face-to-face instruction and personal mentoring. There are complementary roles for community colleges, technical institutes, and for-profit institutions to play; these institutions are especially critical in serving students who would otherwise be nonconsumers of postsecondary education. But universities of the kind that Harvard’s Eliot, Lowell, and Conant envisioned are vital to the cause of higher learning. p. 336

Unique Assets

• Traditional universities have unique asset of a physical campus which creates a community.

• Another unique asset is its professoriate. The Ph.D. who has survived the tenure process is a rigorous thinker with a deep memory who can be a life-changing mentor.

• The most lasting, transformative learning is personal, the result of an intimate, lasting connection with a great teacher. P, 337 Online mentors can also form lasting bonds with students.

• Not coincidentally, the university’s most unique assets relative to the jobs of discovery, memory, and mentoring are also among its most expensive assets. Efficiency-minded educators generally eschew the costs of large brick-and-mortar campuses and of full-time faculty who engage in student mentoring, curriculum development, and discovery research. These assets are valuable because they are unique. But because they are so expensive, the university must deploy them parsimoniously and strategically. P. 338 [Education is not cheap because it’s about PEOPLE, not widgets. NOTE MINE]

Efficiency Imperative

• Typical university must decrease the cost of each degree it grants. Modularizing the curriculum so that students are more likely to finish with the minimum number of required credit hours is key. So is the academic advising and personal tutoring needed to sustain students who would otherwise drop-out

• Year-round operation and efficient classroom scheduling have the potential to increase utilization of physical facilities, for many institutions their second largest cost after faculty salaries and benefits.

• Most powerful mechanism of cost reduction is online learning but they should be tightly integrated with their on-campus counterparts.

• Before long, even the best-taught face-to-face courses will be hybridized, suffused with online components. P. 340

Suicide by Imitation

• Most universities’ fundamental problems are of their own making. They are engaged in genetically driven, destructive rivalry with their own kind—other institutions trying to be the world’s best according to a single, narrow definition of excellence. The universities that followed Harvard’s lead likewise became more expensive and less accessible. P. 343

• Across higher ed generally, the result has been a decrease in the value of a diploma relative to its cost and the closing of doors to would-be students.

• The current system of academic meritocracy, in which tenure depends on publishing via elite journals and academic presses, limits the activities and potential contributions of junior faculty members.

• Learning innovation is undervalued, as are other forms of scholarship that do not result in traditional publication.

Making Choices

• Fortunately the number of students worldwide seeking education is growing, as is the potential for knowledge discovery and the need for culture memory. The world needs more university education, not less. [However, those with only a 4-year degree are among the highest unemployment rate worldwide. How do we marry the need for education with the need for gainful employment? NOTE MINE]

• To succeed in increasingly competitive world, even the best universities must find a strategy that transcends Harvard imitation. P. 345

Chapter 21: Students and Subjects

• Harvard succeeds not only because of its wealth, but because it has limited its choice of students to serve to only the most elite graduate and undergraduate students. In its professional schools, the choice is narrower still—graduate students only.

• Nationwide, only 43 percent of students who enter a two-year public institution seeking a certificate achieve that goal within five years. How3ver, institutions that focus solely on certificates, rather than both associate’s degrees and certificates, achieve a 7 percent graduation rate. P. 349

• A university community must choose which students to serve and recognize that students are primary constituents and the job of mentoring them as being equally or more important than any other, including discovery research. Except in the case of the most elite research institutions, the university that does not view serving students as its primary mission is doomed to decline. [Underlining mine]

• Students have more and different voices now. Online technology allows them to express their opinions as never before.

• For-profits have the advantage in catering to working adults.

• To survive increasing competition, most universities need to be both more student focused and more narrowly focused in their academic offerings. Majors that are chronically under-enrolled and fail to place graduates in careers or graduate programs are candidates for elimination or combination. The number of elective courses offered even in many highly enrolled majors must be reduced.

• The culling should be undertaken with care. Outright elimination of too many majors and courses could be damaging to the institution not only intellectually but also competitively.

• Christensen also advocates a renewal of reengaging on the subject of values and renewing commitment to character development. [???? Questions mine] because universities are in loco parentis and because teaching is a “moral act.”

Chapter 22: Scholarship

• Critical dimension of choice for trad. University is scholarship-related activity.

• Many of the institutions that copied Harvard soon found themselves producing neither great instruction nor noteworthy research. P. 359

• The gauntlet of research scholarship is getting steadily more difficult to run. [What about those who put their ideas online and people around the world build upon them? What about people who don’t even have college degrees but are creating? Building? And contributing to society? Do we need to redefine “publication”? “Scholarly research? NOTE MINE]

• The competition has become global.

• The desire to research and teach specialized, advanced subjects rather than broader ones reflects years of narrow inquiry, not inherent inability to integrate and apply knowledge. [We have created a system that values the research, more than teaching. Why is it that we don’t train university professors in pedagogy? Just because they understand their field, doesn’t mean they can teach. Teaching is not innate; one must learn and develop the craft, just as someone learns, probes, and discovers their area of knowledge expertise. NOTE MINE]

Broader Definition of Scholarship

• Former US Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer suggested a new, fourfold definitions of scholarship. In addition to scholarship of discovery, he added 3 others: integration, application, and teaching. These latter three types would expand the trad. Definition to include putting discoveries into context, showing their application to practical problems, and sharing them with students. P. 365

• Boyer suggested that faculty be given credit for textbooks and “popular writing” assuming review by qualified peers. P. 366

• To perform the critical jobs of discovering and sharing knowledge, universities need a diversity of tenure paths and faculty contracts that provide the essential acknowledgements and rewards. P. 369 [However, this discovery and research and publication can now all take place outside of a university framework. The power of the internet really changes the idea of who publishes, how they publish, and who is a peer reviewer. I don’t think Christensen goes far enough in innovative disruption with this idea of what research and publication will look like with the global interaction of the Internet. NOTE MINE]

Tenure Debate

• Main outcomes of tenure, job security and intellectual self-determination for competent professors are not necessarily a net liability nor are they unique to higher ed. To the extent that tenure is problematic, the problem lies more in the way tenure is granted than in its outcome. P. 371

• Tenure granted for publication skews faculty away from teaching and creates a sense of entitlement to those who survive the process.

The Right Kind of Tenure

• The right kind of tenure rewards employees just like good companies: it works hard to identify people with good long-term potential to contribute; gives them incentives consistent with the org’s goals; invests in their development, and hangs on to them.

• A tenure track does allow professors to innovate in ways that help the university, and allows them the freedom to voice critical opinions and ideas which is healthy in an org.

• Maybe there should be tenure for qualified adjuncts who work online if they pass through a probationary process and demonstrate contribution to the org. p. 375

Chapter 23: New DNA

1. Starting point is to assess the university’s most valuable assets: its faculty and physical campus.

2. Assess how the university does in discovery, mentoring, and memory. –Most need to narrow their choice of students and subjects and to deemphasize discovery scholarship in favor of other forms.

3. Undergraduate students should be involved in the discussion.

4. At same time liberal arts colleges must preserve their advantages in memory and mentoring. The instruction of the liberal arts college should remain predominantly face-to-face and its curriculum cross-disciplinary. It should encourage interactions among professors and students that are personal and inspiring.

5. Great chart on recommendations pp 386-387.

6. Should offer more summer course and create new faculty contracts. Cost efficiency of summer courses is great. P. 387

7. University’s faculty holds the key to successful institutional change.

You Get what you Measure

• Much of the problem in making poor strategic choices lies in the chosen indicators of success. For too long, trad. universities have been more concerned with measure of what they do and what they consume than with measures of what they produce.

• Accreditation teams for example, historically worried about the percentage of faculty holding doctoral degrees, the adequacy of physical facilities and financial reserves, and the number of classroom hours required to graduate.

• Only recently have gov’t regulators demanded accountability for the educational benefits universities produce and the efficiency with which they produce them: What does the college cost? How many students are admitted? How many graduate? How long does it take them to graduate? How many get good jobs.

• One thing is to shift to emphasize things that matter to students and governmental bodies from what matters to scholars and ranking agencies. P. 391.

• We should also invest in qualitative measures as opposed to purely quantitative. Learning measurement technology improvements will help with this.

• Another measure is a ratio analysis: e.g. cost of trad. University education has grown but is it good for what it costs.

• Great lists of things to measure on pp. 392-4 with a shift from quantity to quality and from simple outputs to efficiency and effectiveness rations;

• Also is the shift from what students give the university to what they get from it. P. 395

Chapter 24: Change and the Indispensable University

• Universities will be recognized for the learning they impart rather than for admitting the smartest students

• Not only not only those who cite it will judge the impact of their scholarship but those who integrate, apply, and teach it.

• Traditional academic classifications and rankings will mean less in a world of satisfied students and external supporters.

• Every university that satisfies its chosen constituents can be indispensable. P. 397

• Authors are cautiously optimistic about future of higher ed.

• Caution is that from Clayton’s research, on knows how difficult it is for established organizations to respond to disruptive innovation of the kind accruing now.

• The world desperately needs its university communities. Of all institutions they are best positioned to integrate new discoveries with the wisdom of the past and to show how those discoveries can improve current practice. P. 399

• University communities that focus their activities and measure success in terms of absolute performance rather than relative rank can enjoy a bright future. P. 401 [However, as technology and disruptive innovations take place, I think there are other questions that Christensen did not address. 1. If a college education is more accessible to everyone, what is the meaning of the degree? 2. A degree used to be a ticket to possible employment. Now B.S. degree graduates are underemployed or unemployed worldwide. 3. As more and more institutions are in the degree-granting business, is one degree better than another? Are online degrees as “rigorous” as traditional, in spite of the accreditation hurdles that organizations go through? Will we keep our biases against those non-traditional degree-granting systems? 4) Knowledge and skill are increasingly important, but are degrees? With access to information online, does one have to go to college, if one can just “google” information? QUESTIONS MINE]

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