Communications of the ACM

of schools—the private elite and state flagship universities, the small regionals private or public school, and the start-up. A number of recommendations for these three groups may be found in Lucas1 Exhibit 13-3. Suggested strategies for group 2, the most threatened, include:

˲ Building a brand in a niche like global study experiences

˲ Creating and joining a network of peer institutions

˲ Combining resources on campus and with peers to create technology-enhanced courses.

˲ Purchasing content from others

˲ Developing very high quality in a few programs

˲Considering the elimination of most research to focus on teaching

˲ Increasing teaching loads

˲ Reducing staff and overhead

˲ Sharing facilities such as computer centers, labs, athletic facilities, and so forth

Concluding Thoughts

In 1873 Disraeli said in the English House of Commons that “A university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.” Whether learning technologies enhance that mission or whether they threaten the university itself depends on how academic leaders and faculty members implement technology-enhanced teaching and learning.

Further Reading

Christensen, C., Horn, M., and Johnson, C.

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, N.

McGraw-Hill, NY, 2008 and 2011.

Terwiesch, C. and Ulrich, K. T.

Will video kill the classroom star? The threat and opportunity of massively open online course for full-time MBA programs.

Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2014.

Reference

1. Lucas, H. C., Jr. Technology and the Disruption of Higher Education. World Scientific Press, Singapore, 2016.

Henry C. Lucas, Jr. ( hlucas@rhsmith.umd.edu) is the Robert H. Smith Professor of Information at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, the University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

This article is based on Lucas1 and the author’s experiences teaching traditional, blended, and online courses and a MOOC on Coursera.

Copyright held by author.

ers who can make a compelling case for change.

Schools that do not overcome these obstacles to the adoption of learning technologies dramatically increase the probability that they will fail in the next 15 years.

Threats from Technology

What schools are threatened the least by technology-enhanced education? The selective privates and state flagship universities are not going to disappear. They could, if they fail to innovate, see declining applications and lower quality students, but such a change will take a long time to be noticed given how sticky academic reputations are. Small colleges with strong reputations, loyal alumni, and some endowment are probably all right, but they need to be careful. Potential students may lose interest if they perceive these schools as too resistant to new ways of teaching and learning.

Smaller colleges with low rankings, low endowments and declining enrollments are not in a position to invest in new technologies and will find themselves falling behind other schools.

These schools will have difficulty in meeting student expectations for technology-enhanced teaching and learning. While the colleges may be able to purchase content, they will be at a disadvantage in creating exciting new student experiences like a MOOC-based degree program. They will lack the knowledge, skilled staff, technology infrastructure, and faculty capabilities to make technology pervasive in the curriculum.

The biggest threat is to less well-known schools with a local reputation lacking much of an endowment and a base of wealthy alumni. These schools are often private and tend to have few resources and few, if any, star faculty. They do not have the resources to innovate and will always have to consume what others produce. With tuition probably higher than the state flagship university and fewer resources, what is their value proposition? They need to develop a niche whether in a particular group of subjects, study abroad programs, work-study options or stress the benefits of a small campus. Even that may not be enough if their enrollments drop.

Is Technology the Answer?

Earlier, technology was presented as a double-edged sword, and the preceding examples show how difficult it is for many schools to adopt it successfully, threatening their very existence. Are universities that become content producers and adopt new learning technologies guaranteed a healthy future? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is “no;” many schools are caught between declining applications and enrollments, declining state aid for publics, increases in tuition, insufficient endowments, increasing costs, and pressures from parents and the government to do something about constantly rising college costs. Schools need to consider many options for reform in addition to the implementation of learning technologies.

The opportunities for reform are many and a number may be found in Lucas. 1 Areas to consider include the tenure system, teaching loads, resources devoted to research, long summer vacations, departments with few students, bloated administrations and bureaucracies, staff sizes, faculty governance, expenditures on physical plant, and the distortions from high-cost varsity football and basketball programs. Universities are complex institutions with many actors and stakeholders. Saving schools that are on the edge will require concerted action across a number of variables to make the system work.