{"id":5271,"date":"2012-08-02T18:36:22","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T10:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=5271"},"modified":"2025-03-08T09:06:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T09:06:51","slug":"education-reform-disruption-to-what-extent-will-online-education-replace-brick-and-mortar-education-in-the-next-10-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2012\/08\/02\/education-reform-disruption-to-what-extent-will-online-education-replace-brick-and-mortar-education-in-the-next-10-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Education Reform & Disruption: To what extent will online education replace brick-and-mortar education in the next 10 years?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Scott:<\/strong><\/p>\n

If it\u2019s not a revolution, online education is certainly an\u00a0upheaval that\u2019s going to replace a big chunk of what currently exists in the\u00a0higher education world.<\/p>\n

My view – perhaps politically incorrect – is that there are\u00a0two classes of college students in this country:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. those who can pursue largely\u00a0academic interests because they are wealthy or smart enough to get scholarships,<\/li>\n
  2. and those who are mainly in need of real-world career training.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The problem is\u00a0that the vast majority of students fit into the latter group, but our college\u00a0and university system is designed primarily to serve the former.<\/p>\n

    We need philosophers, historians and writers in our society\u00a0– but we have far more school capacity to train people in those specialties than\u00a0we really need. When I attended college in the 1970\u2019s, virtually all my friends\u00a0were English or political science majors with no career goal. After graduation,\u00a0most drifted into law school, which put them onto a fairly viable career track.<\/p>\n

    But things have changed. It\u2019s much harder today to \u201cdrift\u201d into a successful career.
    \nEvery specialty, including law, has become far more competitive and demanding
    \nin terms of skill sets. I never cease to be amazed by magazine articles and
    \ncomplaints from \u201cOccupy\u201d people that they can\u2019t get a good job after spending
    \nfour years to get a degree that gives them no usable job skills whatever.<\/p>\n

    Online learning has become part of the solution to this\u00a0problem by making a very wide number of associates and bachelor\u2019s degree\u00a0programs available with a sharp focus on career training and by exerting, for\u00a0the first time in decades, at least some downward pressure on higher education\u00a0costs.<\/p>\n

    A hot issue is that this category was initially served\u00a0mainly by for-profit schools that now engender a lot of debate. But the\u00a0criticism of for-profit schools overlooks two key facts:<\/p>\n

    1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A lot of the people who need online education\u00a0are not traditional college age kids, but adults returning to college, and the\u00a0traditional colleges and universities has been extremely slow to address their\u00a0needs.<\/p>\n

    2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The world of the for-profit schools is changing,\u00a0not so much due to government regulation (in my opinion) but because their\u00a0business model is being challenged by new non-profit online schools and even\u00a0some private and state schools who have finally woken up to online education.<\/p>\n

    Even within the for-profit school sector, there\u2019s a newer group of schools who\u00a0are delivering degree programs at more affordable tuition levels than what was\u00a0the norm just a few years ago.<\/p>\n

    Schools like Western Governors University, an unusual\u00a0non-profit school, have stepped up and made a big step into online education\u00a0while keeping the price reasonable. Perhaps more importantly, we\u2019re seeing\u00a0schools like The University of Southern New Hampshire, a heretofore little-known\u00a0state institution, get national attention quickly by launching big online\u00a0learning programs.<\/p>\n

    Unlike such famous flame-outs as the U. of Illinois\u2019 \u201cglobal\u00a0campus\u201d a few years back, Southern New Hampshire\u2019s initiative seems to have\u00a0real legs.<\/p>\n

    There\u2019s no way to guarantee that the quality of all online\u00a0degree programs will be equal. But frankly, the same can be said of brick and\u00a0mortar schools.<\/strong> <\/em>Both the traditional colleges and the existing online schools\u00a0are going to see growing competition from schools that can bring a good\u00a0reputation and affordable tuition to the online degree sector – because it\u2019s\u00a0what more and more students want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Bob Scott: If it\u2019s not a revolution, online education is certainly an\u00a0upheaval that\u2019s going to replace a big chunk of what currently exists in the\u00a0higher education world. My view – perhaps politically incorrect – is that there are\u00a0two classes of college students in this country: those who can pursue largely\u00a0academic… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[582],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-1n1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14644,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271\/revisions\/14644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}