Higher Education in a Decade of Disruption

Abstract

Political, economic and technological trends are converging to create major change in higher education. This paper focuses on the impact of evolving technologies notably online learning, which will do far more than change pedagogy because it is a disruptive technology – and disruptive technologies rarely favour existing providers.// So far online is not causing major change. In public higher education institutions it is hiking rather than cutting costs, is not improving student performance, and is often of poor quality. However, this will change as online learning takes an ever larger share of student enrolments. More and more students are opting for the online mode and course enrolments in eLearning are expanding faster than in campus-based courses. Projections suggest that over 80% of US students will be taking courses online in 2014.// The disruptive paradigm will not be eLearning per se, but the combination of online technologies, lower-cost provision and for-profit corporate structures. Already in the US the for-profit higher education sector has a much higher share of the online market (32%) than of the overall market (7%).// Higher education will follow other business sectors in moving from full-service to self-service models of provision. An example is the new Open Education Resource University (OERU), described in the final section. Yet, in a reminder that history sometimes repeats itself, the OERU has distinct echoes of the University of London External System that was created over 150 years ago.