Future of Online Education

I read a real visionary piece on the future of online education in a recent Education Signals newsletter. It is a summary of remarks at a recent education conference by Gary Keisling, chairman of Ashworth University, a for-profit backed Sterling Partners. Keisling has 20 years of for-profit education experience and gave a talk titled, "€œNew thinking in for-profit education models to advance cutting edge investment strategies."€ He described the career college of the future, the school he might build today if starting from scratch. Highlights include:

•  Delivery, outcomes and branding of education over the next 20 years will be much more than a simple reflection of old systems and more aggressively influenced by trends in technology and Internet socialization.
• Embracing Web 2.0 principles, including community, low cost, no censorship and individuality enable a new model for education.
•  Internet socialization will be facilitated and encouraged by the school and online and on-ground content will be completely equal and completely blended at the students’ discretion
•  The current system in which the cost of postsecondary education rises rapidly ahead of the pace of inflation, leaving new graduates tens of thousands of dollars in debt would finally collapse on itself and turn the current concept of brand embodied by a paper (?!) diploma, on its head.
•  The generation that grew up with Web 2.0 and MySpace as the norm, will reward models that focus on results-based learning and job attainment over a brand on a diploma.
• The new model will allow flexibility in curriculum design, and even a menu-based curriculum that will offer more choice in course selection.
•  Costs will be radically lower with revenue and profit generated far more through add-on services and third-party relationships (think of UTI’s company-sponsored graduate programs applied to other fields).
•  There are opportunities to focus on underserved niches: Hispanic market, retiring baby boomers and people seeking very strong career placement tools & capabilities
• The school would develop consortiums with other schools to share leads and gain leverage
•  One of the school’s major focuses would be negotiating articulation agreements and speaking out in every possible forum about credit transfer issues.
• Low cost programs will free schools from outmoded regulatory burdens and new arbiters of quality and value will emerge to replace the old systems.
•  One example could be instruction in multiple languages, multiple states, and even multiple countries all currently tightly controlled.