ONLINE VERSUS TRADITIONAL LEARNING

Only four or five years ago it was common wisdom to observe that online learning had not proved itself and was unlikely to displace more traditional forms of education. Early experiments in this area foundered and lost traction, and it was easy to assume that this would be true for quite awhile. But today, the outlook is very different. Robust and successful online courses are just beginning to be developed, but things are moving fast. There are many reasons to feel confident that this form of education will account for a larger and larger share of the way faculty teach and students learn in the years ahead. Online education is powerful and appealing as well as comparatively inexpensive and increasingly effective in accomplishing its goals; the only safe assumption is that it is here to stay, and to flourish.

Many professors are engaged in fascinating and diverse efforts to enhance their traditional courses by using online methods and sources; their focus is primarily on their “own” students on their home campus. Others are designing massive open online courses (MOOCs) to reach students in far-flung parts of the world who otherwise would never have the opportunity to learn from a faculty member at Stanford or Berkeley or Harvard or MIT. Both of these motivations are admirable, and much important work is now being done; but we need to recognize that the implications of each of these adventures for our business model are likely to be both significant and difficult to predict.

There are also implications for how members of the faculty do their work and how they are perceived within the professional guilds we call disciplines. Some are already recognized as the providers of content and creators of online courses that professors at other institutions will use. This may be in the best interest of the students who will get to learn from the most admired and productive teachers in any given discipline; but this development threatens to downgrade the status of those professors on other campuses who may be seen as teaching assistants or preceptors for someone else's course. Innovative and creative ways to “flip” a classroom can overcome this problem and turn this into a win-win situation. Teaching seminars based on material students have mastered online at their own pace and on their own time can be an exhilarating opportunity. But we need to pay attention to the effects of this “flip” at both our most prestigious and less prestigious institutions.

In online teaching as it is now conceived, we can discover much more about how students learn and which teaching methods are most effective in what contexts. This is one of many benefits of curricular development online. Many questions emerge about how all this will work out in practice. For instance: What will be the effect of this new system on the graduate students on whom professors in universities rely so much for research and teaching assistance and nascent colleagueship? How will their probable futures be affected? Will their motivations for choosing our profession be changed by these developments, and will more of them seek different kinds of work?

It is also not clear how we will pay for this. It seems unlikely that we can continue to provide extensive online education at no cost to the enrolled students; but no compelling for-profit (or even break-even) business model has emerged. What about issues of accreditation and accountability? How do we know the person who is “signed up” for the course and receiving certification, and potentially credit, is who he says he is? Systems for grading thousands of students online are beginning to be developed, but so far, these work best with multiple-choice assignments or in disciplines where the mastery of relevant knowledge is relatively clear-cut and easy to assess. How would an instructor assess thousands of philosophy essays simultaneously submitted online? What about the issues concerning motivation to work in isolation from other students and faculty? Most people who enroll in a MOOC today drop out of the course somewhere along the way. Can there be any real supervision of the student in cyberspace, or serious interaction of those who are “taking the course” with each other and with faculty members?

These problems are not insoluble, and progress in addressing each of them has been made. The possibilities for interaction of those taking the course with each other, both in cyberspace and in regional discussion groups, are very promising, for instance. But all these issues require more thoughtful attention and creative ingenuity than some initial enthusiasts seemed to assume.

SHIFTING LOYALTIES

The second challenge is the migration of loyalties. While this is still a small cloud on the horizon, it is something we need to anticipate. Professors and students are deeply intrigued by these new forms of conveying knowledge, and many members of the faculty are engaged in developing the very online courses that undermine our conventional business model. These activities may also lead some professors to develop competing loyalties to the programs and entities that help them develop and distribute online courses, rather than the institutions (or the disciplines) to which they have been primarily loyal in the past. If instructors find it more intriguing and rewarding to design new online courses for an open-ended audience rather than tweak their familiar curricular offerings yet one more time, this competes with their commitment to traditional classroom teaching. This new time commitment adds yet another “pull” away from campus in addition to consulting, travel to conferences, textbook writing, and other familiar endeavors.

A new “social contract” between faculty members and their “home” institutions, suggested by several university leaders recently, is one step that could be taken. But what responsibilities, benefits, and duties, on both sides, will this involve? Developing a new understanding requires good-faith effort on the part of both faculty and administrators: the former cannot see themselves entirely as “free agents” while they rely on the reputation and resources of their university, but the resourceful educational innovation they provide should not be stifled by overly restrictive stipulations.

Students may also have less strong ties to any particular institution, seeing higher education more and more like a shopping mall rather than an institutional home. As this happens, what is the future of residential education, a tremendously powerful form of learning for generations of young people over the past centuries? The two forms of learning are not incompatible, and can be mutually enhancing. But who gets the double benefits, and who chooses (or is limited to) learning in cyberspace alone? If it's only a matter of money, we know the outcome: richer students will enjoy the campuses and all their related opportunities and poorer ones will rely solely on the online courses. To avoid this inequity and not repeat the bad old days in which our most distinguished universities and colleges taught only the children of the wealthy, vigorous financial aid programs are more important than ever. Yet only a few institutions can commit to true “need-blind admissions” and pay the costs of this generous policy. Residential education can be expected to retain its appeal as a transition experience to young adulthood for many students for the foreseeable future, even as online education becomes more central; but we have not done a good job of figuring out how to make residential education, as we know it, affordable—which brings us to the third disruptive challenge.

COSTS

The most important source of funds for many institutions of higher education has always been students paying tuition for residential education at the undergraduate and professional degree levels. This source is now undermined by the availability of online courses as well as the increasing perception that college is “out of reach” financially. While all this exciting online innovative entrepreneurship is happening, the most selective colleges and universities are still in the mode of competing on rich curricular and extracurricular offerings, plentiful services for students—the country-club model—to bolster our reputations as residential institutions. This is very costly, as are the salaries for the professors we want to keep, many of whom are the very ones whose migrating loyalties threaten the status quo. The days of the underpaid dedicated faculty member or university officer are fortunately long past, but we have veered in the opposite direction when we can ill afford to do this. Paying top dollar for a few stars is not a sustainable long-term strategy in the current financial context. Because we don't have the pressure of the bottom line that leads businesses to be more efficient, we need to take charge of this problem head-on. We need to question some of the decisions and practices in our internal bureaucracies, not just see all our current problems as the result of external attack.

Rising costs also stem, in part, from the steady growth of administrative services that many observers have noted. This increase in staff happens partly because of growing government requirements; but as campus leaders we must recognize that we bear much of the responsibility for this. It's easier to add staff than to subtract, and there are always plausible arguments for why this new program is critical to our college's success. The recent fiscal crisis (which may repeat itself) helped institutions prune staff to some degree, but the problem remains. We must preserve the crucial managers as well as the front-line responsive staff who matter most so we don't become a robot-call-in, perpetually “on hold” institution. Unlike some corporations, we cannot address the proliferation of staff with harsh draconian cuts overnight without disrupting the community we prize. But we can take a harder look at our patterns of doing business and see how we might, gradually, shift some of these practices in new directions.

Salaries are always the most expensive part of the budget, and costs cannot continue to rise indefinitely. Part of the impetus for online learning comes from its greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and if campus-based learning is to compete, we need to recognize that costs do matter. Collaboration could be part of the answer in controlling costs: colleges and universities in the same region (or connected online) can cooperate in offering certain kinds of courses or providing certain kinds of services. Here, as elsewhere, priorities must be set; no institution can do everything. We can share information about best practices and try to find ways to avoid competing with each other out of business, even as we recognize that some competition among us is both healthy and inevitable. A more enlightened approach from the US Department of Justice, recognizing that nonprofit enterprises have a different business model from for-profit entities, could also be helpful.

FEDERAL FUNDING

Our research universities—and to a lesser extent, the strongest liberal arts colleges—rely heavily on federal funds to support sponsored research. Today's fiscal problems in Washington, DC, and many of the states have led to an erosion of support for scientific research, and more dramatic cuts are threatened in the future. We can make a strong case for the crucial importance of scientific research and development, and many university leaders are spending time trying to make these arguments persuasively. But the political climate is not propitious. The current political arena—firm resistance to more taxes, disdain for compromise to achieve our goals—means that we face an uphill battle. As political scientists, we have a special responsibility and a special opportunity to frame this discussion with government offices and public leaders most positively, and in a way most likely to yield good outcomes.

We need to continue to press hard to make our case, because robust scientific research and development truly are in the best interests of our nation and the world. But we should also think about alternatives, including private philanthropy (which often comes with strings attached) and corporate support (which almost always does). Despite these potential pitfalls, both corporate partnerships and private philanthropy are promising sources of support that we should explore and cultivate, always mindful of the fundamental importance of protecting the independence and integrity of our research.

GLOBAL COMPETITION

Universities that were not on our radar screen in the United States a decade ago are now effectively competing with us for resources including both faculty and students. Many of these institutions have ample assurance of support from governments determined that their national image will be burnished by strong universities, compared with the laissez faire or even negative attitudes of the US federal and state governments today. Unlike the United States, which has been very fortunate in this respect, government support for higher education in many countries comes with strings attached, including potential repression and limitations on what can be taught and by whom. But the competition with our universities can still be very strong. It is easy for those who have long been rated in their sectors as the “best of breed” to be complacent; complacency unfortunately has become too common in American higher education because of our long predominance.

Today, much of the discussion of globalization concentrates on partnerships with universities in other countries, or the establishment of branches of our universities abroad. These strategies come with their own opportunities and challenges. A single-minded focus on these efforts, however, can obscure the ways in which developing institutions in other countries are now challenging us in ways we have not considered in the past. These institutions (and their supportive governments) may resist the incursion of online learning through courses “made in the USA,” complicating our efforts to reach out broadly around the world. They will provide their own online offerings as this form of education becomes more prominent. And they will surely compete more and more effectively for students whose first choice for higher education has always been in North America.

PROTECTION OF FACTORS WORTH SAVING

With these five challenges in mind, what aspects of higher education most merit protection through a period of disruptive change?

The first factor worthy of protection is the community of learners that has been a distinctive aspect of education since the days of Plato's Academy. This community typically involves scholars of several generations learning and teaching with each other. It can be virtual instead of physical, to some extent, but we need to be careful about assuming that face-to-face interaction can ever be fully replaced in cyberspace.

The second factor to protect is the integrity of the teaching and research process. One reason the challenges of online learning are so complicated is that it is harder to maintain scholarly integrity in fluid, complex, online situations than in a community of people who know each other well and work together consistently. It should not be beyond our power to devise ways to do this, but we need to give that a high priority as we deal with the disruptive change.

Third, we need to preserve the canon of works from the past that have been inspirational to students and researchers for many centuries. It is tempting to be so intrigued by the novel and the unexpected that one underestimates the importance of the classics in many different fields—landmark achievements of the human spirit that have been protected and stewarded in our libraries, museums, and galleries. Some of this preservation can be facilitated by new technologies; but maintaining familiar forms of knowledge through the twists and turns of technological innovation is a challenge in itself. Amidst all of this change, we need to give high priority to preserving and handing on to our successors the foundational treasures that have done so much to make education worth our while. The student reading a great classic under a tree should not be totally replaced by the one absorbing the most up-to-date discoveries in cyberspace.

Finally, we also need to protect our openness to the future—our flexible readiness to understand and address the next disruptive change—which will surely come. This means leadership that shows adaptation and ingenuity, at the same time that we keep our most fundamental values and priorities firmly in mind.

As we political scientists ponder how we might help our institutions and their leaders achieve these goals—adapting to disruptive change while we protect what is most essential—some policy recommendations are in order.

First, we should shape new partnerships between governments, universities, philanthropists, and employers to provide reliable funding for higher education in its diverse forms.

Second, as we do this, we should be particularly aggressive and creative in seeking sources of generous financial aid for students who cannot afford our increasingly costly higher education so that our “elite” colleges and universities do not become bastions of privilege again.

Third, we must find reliable new ways of storing knowledge so that the wisdom of the past (an ever-increasing resource) will not be lost to the future as technology changes with such dizzying speed.

And finally, we need to ensure that higher education organizations and governmental agencies craft new forms of regulation and accreditation for online learning from multiple universities around the globe, and do so in a timely fashion, before evolving practice sets the rules for us with no input from our wisest leaders.

In the “Author's Introduction” to Democracy in America, Tocqueville noted that the privileged Europeans of his time were so focused on the pre-Revolutionary past that they were unaware of both the threats and the opportunities of the future that was inevitably upon them. He describes their stance in this way: “Positioned as we are in the middle of a rapid stream, we stare fixedly at a few ruins we can still see on the shore as the current drags us away backwards towards the abyss.” His prescription for dealing with this dangerous short-sightedness: “A new political science is needed for a totally new world.”Footnote ¹

The references to “ruins” and the “abyss” seem inapposite for our topic; things are surely not that bad. One of my major themes has been the positive opportunities available to us in this “troubled” time. But the notion of a current pulling us in one direction while too many of us are looking the other way does seem appropriate for many leaders of higher education today. And the hope of new insights from political science in understanding this new world surely provides an exhilarating opportunity for those of us who profess this discipline to use our skills to help ease the transition to the future.