This is an interesting post about perspectives from the President of Thunderbird - School of Global Management (my alma mater)... I think the MIT Open Courseware Intiative Model is another disruptive innovation.
@Thomas Crompton
As President of the Thunderbird School of Global Management Angel Cabrera has observed a fascinating new trend in US university education, largely driven by the Internet.
First, the Ivy League model: Get as many highly paid Nobel laureates and great researchers as possible and select a small number of elite students. This model has been increasingly copied by many state schools, with the result of a somewhat inefficient use of resources. Many government supported schools, who have a mandate to educate the masses, get caught up in the race to have prestigious professors and selective admissions.
Now, enter the Internet, a total game-changer. Suddenly you now have scalable teaching methods where one teacher can engage an almost limitless population of students over distance and time.
One of the best examples, Cabrera said, is the University of Phoenix, which offer online degrees using great materials and teachers.
These may be online degrees, but Angel says you would be wrong to dismiss them. Instead of concentrating on paying many professors, the University of Phoenix and others in this cadre of online universities concentrate on creating the best possible learning curriculum that can be taught online and then administered in-person by lower non-specialists.
The power of the model is that they now have scale. Another interesting implementation of these methods that I have experienced is Praxis Language with their Chinese Pod teaching method. Praxis combines podcasts, blogging and twittering in a very effective way to teach Mandarin and a range of other languages.
Ken Carroll, one of the founders of Praxis, speaks about how the Internet creates a new cadre of teachers who become almost famous due to the large following of students under their tutelage. I experienced this effect when meeting Ken and his colleagues in Shanghai. Their podcasts gave me a tremendous sense of intimacy with them, a near emotional bond, though we had never met before. Here is a video interview I did with Ken.
New media channels are opening up times for learning that did not exist before. Now I can glance at my mobile phone to review a lesson in an elevator, instead waiting to sit down with a heavy textbook. With an Amazon Kindle or other e-reader a child does not need to carry a 30 kg backpack of books.
Here in Hong Kong, with the regular threat of avian flu, many schools have invested heavily in some quite effective e-learning platforms. There is even talk about launching school within virtual worlds to make the learning a more immersive experience.
The problem, of course, is that many professors and universities are - by definition - highly conservative. Many need to wake up to the opportunities (and threats) of new styles of teaching.