March 30, 2010

External Pressures Bring Changes to Higher Education

By: Christopher Hill in Distance Learning

Higher education faces a number of pressures today that online learning may be able to help address.  The economy is increasingly driven by knowledge and technology continues to evolve.  At the same time, people are becoming more mobile while demanding lifelong learning to meet their educational needs.  All of these pressures are coming to bear on academe, and universities are deciding whether and how to respond.

For most institutions, change is inevitable.  “External forces are putting on more pressure to change than internal pressures to stay the same,” says Kelly Edmonds, doctoral candidate in higher education research at the University of Calgary.  She has identified a “second order change” beginning in higher education that will likely force a number of paradigm shifts in response to three main types of forces affecting the university.  This second order change, while a painful process that brings about dramatic shifts in the way an organization operates, may herald the next generation of higher education practice as the academy shifts to serve a new kind of student, a new kind of economy, and new demands on those who have dedicated their lives to education.

Tension #1:  Economic Forces
Everyone who works in higher education is aware that the academy is not insulated from economic pressures.  Governmental support for higher education is dwindling, with the situation more dramatic in the U.S. than Canada, says Edmonds.  This loss of traditional sources of income means that universities are exploring different models of balancing the budget.  One potential response is a move to the “business model,” an idea that is gaining traction among an academic population that a few years ago would have recoiled at the idea that the provision of education has any similarities with the marketing of other goods and services.  “The term [business model] is actually being used at the University of Calgary,” says Edmonds.

In addition, no discussion of economic forces would be complete without mentioning competition, and higher education is certainly seeing its share.  Privately-owned, for-profit institutions have become very successful bringing traditional business practices, like an emphasis on customer service, to the table.  Traditional universities are feeling the pressure to compete with these for-profits or lose a certain segment of their potential student population.

As a result, Edmond notes, universities are being asked to adapt to an entrepreneurial culture with a focus on market share, branding, and consumerism of students.  “Universities are moving to commodify education; education is being sold as a product,” she says.  While this may be a reasonable response to these pressures, some members of the university, particularly the faculty, are “feeling a loss,” Edmonds says.  This sense of loss leads to another set of pressures that she characterizes as philosophical resistance.

Tension #2:  Philosophical Resistance
Many of the objections that faculty might have to the growth of online learning are well known.  Edmonds identifies several factors in play, such as questions of quality arising from the commodification of education and poor application of technology.  Concerns about quality can also stem from a sense of loss of connection to students and the changes to the traditional role of faculty member as expert and lecturer, a model that nearly all of the current generations of faculty members would have experienced in their own career as students.

Many faculty prefer to use conventional pedagogical methods in their classroom.  They have a vested interest in these methods, Edmonds finds, and there is a strong Western tradition of the transmission of knowledge from the experts to the learners that is altered in the more egalitarian online environment.

Finally, faculty may have concerns about job security.  Many of the current generations of faculty may feel they are giving up some control of the curriculum to instructional designers, especially if these faculty members do not possess the skills to design an online course themselves.  Along with this insecurity come concerns about the erosion of academic freedom, as the development of a course comes to require more of a team approach and less of the time-honored tradition of a professor alone in his or her office, consulting reference materials and creating a new course independently.

Tension #3:  Political Challenges for Leaders
Edmonds likens changing a university to turning around a ship – a slow process that requires much careful maneuvering.  Each of the tensions mentioned above can cause a political challenge for higher education leadership:  global competition, competition from for-profits, competing budgets, academic structure and governance, lack of e-learning policies, academic freedom, and resistance by the faculty.

To address all of these concerns, universities will have to embrace this “second order change” that Edmonds identifies.  This is a period of change during which the status quo is destabilized, beliefs are questioned, and the next move is unknown until the institution passes through the change and can “refreeze” in a new form.

Navigating this change is critical for higher education as a whole to move from incorporating online learning solely as a one-off program and into using its delivery and pedagogical methods across the academy.  The institutions who can embrace the challenges of change may be pleased at the new paradigms open to them in the future.

Excerpted from Are You Giving Up Control of the Ship? Three Pressures You May Not be able to Resist, Distance Education Report, July 1, 2008.

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