The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities

This article by King & Sen describes how the "traditional university" model has been "under attack" by external forces, and examines some possible responses. The basic idea is that traditional universities should take advantage of research to provide students with a differentiated learning-experience. 

I have posted about that before:

The question is: what is the future of the existing schools in this context? To survive they will have to focus on the academic tasks that can not be massively delivered online, such as: 

1) Applied research to serve local communities (social sciences, health, etc.)

2) Post-graduate degrees (MAs and PhDs), although low-cost online programs will come as well. 

3) Teaching classes that need hands-on work in areas like engineering or medicine, etc.   

To summarize, the new way of delivering online education will bring an international division of labor where local schools will have to be involved in the applications of the knowledge learnt online.They could very likely become applied research-and-teaching universities. 

Why Universities Should [and must] Accept Classes by Udacity, Coursera, MR, etc.?

A mission of a university can be "to educate future leaders," "to educate responsible citizens," "to teach and disseminate certain kind of ideas," "to advance science, the arts, and good literature,""to explore, create, and challenge knowledge," "to change a country," "to change a continent," "to change the world!!!," etc. The mission represents an enormous challenge that requires a lot of good judgment, resources, discipline, and focus [and much more!].  

Now, lets imagine a universities [be it public, private, in a developed, or a developing country] can get some resources for free. The consequence is that it is now going to be easier, or not as difficult, to accomplish its mission.

Free online classes offered by Udacity, Coursera [and now Marginal Revolution University!], etc., are free, good quality, resources that universities can take advantage of. Universities worldwide should look at these providers as complements rather than competitors or substitutes [imagine a baker who can get some important ingredients for free! Should he take them?]. 

The mission of a university is not to teach a sociology class, or a economics class, the mission is much greater than that. Accepting classes offered by online providers just makes it easier [and cheaper!] to accomplish the greater mission. 

More specifically, why universities should accept these classes for credit?

1) It is a way to reduce the problem of overcrowding in public universities [think about universities in Cameroon, Nigeria, etc., etc.]. This happens especially in introductory classes, and it is also a common problem in developed countries.  

2) This will free some resources for other educational purposes: to teach advanced and interdisciplinary classes, to apply concepts to case studies, to do applied research, etc.

But probably the most important reason is that this will let a university to allocate more resources to accomplish its mission. 

In fact, it seems that if universities do not do that [meaning accepting online classes] it is because they are not really mission driven. 

Why wasting resources in teaching some knowledge that is already free online, when one can apply it to generate solutions and more knowledge? 

Now Robots can grade essays

[A] study, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, compared the software-generated ratings given to more than 22,000 short essays, written by students in junior high schools and high school sophomores, to the ratings given to the same essays by trained human readers.

The differences, across a number of different brands of automated essay scoring software (AES) and essay types, were minute. “The results demonstrated that over all, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items,” the Akron researchers write, “with equal performance for both source-based and traditional writing genre.”

Read the article here. It has more information. Imagine a future where undergrad thesis, PhD dissertations, and scientific journals articles are reviewed by robots? 

HT: Matt Yglesias.