Kevin Carey’s discussion of Christopher Edley’s online gambit at the University of California skips over the comparisons many of us are making between Edley’s utopian vision and the utopian vision of other (failed) online ventures to say, “Hey, what about the long-distance future? Then, UC’s complete gamble looks good.” The temptation is to point to Yogi Berra: prediction is very hard, especially about the future.
More analytically, in this universe, there isn’t a first-mover advantage as Carey asserts. If anything, there’s frequently a first-mover penalty for non-profit or public universities sinking millions of dollars into a venture that they really don’t know how to do competently. That’s not a statement of general institutional incompetence but the nature of distance education. We know millions of people are earning credit for participating in online courses, or at least for registering and paying for them and for the instructor assigning grades. That doesn’t mean they’re getting anywhere close to 90% of a Berkeley experience (whatever that might be, but that was Carey’s suggestion as a standard).
There are two modal forms of online education I’ve seen (feel free to suggest others in comments): the boutique and the mass-produced. The boutique model is labor-intensive and often works when there is a program focus on a specific market that the institution has some specialization in, and when there is either an institutional decision to subsidize the program or when there is tuition income to support it. Can Berkeley run online classes in such subjects where it would have some unique specialties? See how many other North American universities teach Tibetan as a language; that is a niche market.
The mass-produced version is like a giant lecture course but with HTML. Whether it’s worth all the candlepower depends on the nature of the course and what’s available. If it’s a music-history class, and what’s online draws from a gigantic library of performances, I can easily imagine that an online version would be at least as educational as having 200 students sitting in a lecture hall (though my instinct from a teacher’s perspective would be to prefer an hour of in-person lecture per week with the rest online).
But what if you try a mass-produced class for a subject that requires intensive contact between students and teachers? Composition, say, or conversational classes in most introductory foreign languages. No university has a niche in that, so what do you offer in terms of quality? You can either hire teaching assistants and arrange online tutoring (sounds like a face-to-face large lecture class to me) or try to run it on the cheap(er). The latter is death, and even with online opportunities for tutoring, I suspect that won’t satisfy the needs of many students. More generally, not every class can be taught online without substantial investment, and unless you get that right, students who can vote with their feet will make sure that poorly-planned online empires collapse because of lack of enrollment. Or as Yogi said, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark how are you going to stop them?”
“More analytically, in this universe, there isn’t a first-mover advantage as Carey asserts.”
Yes, generally speaking.
But the larger point is that initial ventures that can package (Illich) well-established cultural fragments (that have been already been institutionalized) that litter the landscape in new ways, can also succeed. All new social institutions are constructed using accepted meaning and values, using organizational bits already available.
And I think this applies to for-profits, generally speaking — since they have successfully capitalized on values and norms of higher education (i.e., accreditation, degrees, graduates, classes, tests, statistics, financial aid, etc.) at the same time they constructed an ephemeral internet presence. This is exactly why they are so difficult to contest — and cannot be contested by those whose lunch the for-profits are eating.
The contrast with brick-and-mortar is striking; but a college is a college when it fulfills most (but not all) of our cultural expectations about what a college “really is.” This elasticity in the cultural definition of “college” (which is socially constructed) is what makes such variations as online programs and colleges possible.
But it is not possible, when cultural norms are met, to rule out what might succeed (depending on what that means) and what will fail. But I believe that something that infuses higher ed with (much needed) legitimacy has a greater chance of succeeding.
The existing failure of efforts such as Edley’s suggests that it’s not as simple as repackaging “cultural fragments.”
I think it’s an error to conflate online/bricks-‘n’-mortar with for-profit/non-profit. As Dean Dad points out, the for-profit model makes growth pay, unlike the situation for most public institutions. Teaching classes online shapes that to some degree, but for-profits figured out their model (good or ill) before the expansion of online classes.
New organizational forms are quite rare. Even, for example, the explosion of education-based orgs (test prep schools, SAT CDs, you name it) still has the holy trinity of education: teachers/students/grades. This is what makes innovation so difficult.
My point is quite different from the observation regarding for-profit scaling success, since those characteristics of an organization that contribute to its reliability and reproducibility are precisely what define structural inertia (Hannan and Freeman, 1984). Grounding new ventures in age-old institutional logics allows them to share in some of that legitimacy, org theory argues.