EPILOGUE:
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

The previous chapter analyzes various dimensions of online courseware projects in their current forms. But in this evolving field, the terrain is shifting rapidly. With the sustainability of online courseware initiatives in question and evidence of their impact encouraging but inconclusive, it will be critical to demonstrate the concrete value that projects like these can provide—either within their parent institutions or elsewhere in the higher-education sector. University leaders contemplating new courseware investments must not only consider their peers’ experiences to date, but also think strategically about the transformative opportunities that online instruction might hold for their institutions in the long run. This final chapter offers insight into where the field might be headed and considers how its ripple effects may be felt throughout higher education.

A number of future trajectories can be imagined for the projects profiled here, with different approaches to content creation—and varying institutional contexts—opening up distinct possibilities. Broadcasting digital audio or video recordings of lectures—as described in this book’s chapters on webcast.berkeley, Open Yale Courses (OYC), and the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)—is becoming an increasingly common activity, as is evident from the growing amount of content on iTunes U and YouTube.¹ In addition to serving as study aids for review purposes, recorded lectures—in particular those, like webcast.berkeley, that are posted within days of live delivery—may also allow students to time-shift a portion of their education and “attend” lectures on demand. Current students, familiar with services like Hulu, TiVo, and streaming Netflix, are increasingly accustomed to receiving content anywhere at any time, and they have mounting expectations of what constitutes standard technological support for their education. Berkeley Provost George Breslauer said that with each generation, students “increasingly expect to have these options available because that’s what they grew up with, that’s what they’re comfortable with. So to some extent, giving them the benefits of those kinds of technologies is just part of the undergraduate experience wherever it’s being held.”²

Should student demand continue to drive selective universities toward lecture capture initiatives, the availability of recorded content might prompt changes in lecture-based pedagogies, even at the elite level. Berkeley’s approach to webcasting has established that lecture capture costs can be kept low enough to enable the recording of key courses every time they are taught—a valuable study tool for students that can serve as a welcome supplement to their otherwise traditional, in-person classroom experience.³ But lecture capture could potentially enable more substantial curricular change. This technology content makes possible the institutional reuse of one set of recorded lectures several semesters in a row, obviating the need for a professor to deliver the same lectures in person year after year. Such an approach could leave faculty members with more time to devote to upper-level seminar teaching, one-on-one student advising, or research. It could also serve as a cost-cutting measure for the institution, allowing a university to spread the costs of instruction over a broader cohort of students and to realize greater benefits from limited resources like classroom space and faculty time.⁴

Steps in this direction are already evident on a smaller scale: at least one professor participating in webcast.berkeley “uses [the webcast] to over-enroll” his highly popular introductory astronomy course, allowing students relegated to the waiting list to keep up with the webcasts for the first few lectures of the semester, until enough students drop the course that seats free up.⁵ Especially for public universities—where space is at a premium and students frequently have trouble gaining admission to key courses needed to progress through their majors and maintain normal time-to-degree—the use of prerecorded lectures may generate needed efficiencies. Recorded lectures from one strong course might even be reused across multiple institutions, potentially allowing for sustainability models that distribute costs accordingly.

At universities with greater resources, where cutting costs and scaling up offerings are less critical concerns, lecture capture might lead faculty members in different directions. Once their course lectures are available for on-demand viewing, some faculty members may introduce or further develop differentiating elements of the “live” versions, to ensure that lecture content does not become stale and that attending in person remains beneficial for students. Possibilities include reorganizing lecture time to encourage more exchange and conversation between students and with the instructor, or incorporating technologies such as “clickers” (hand-held devices that allow students to respond immediately to a professor’s questions) to heighten opportunities for interaction.⁶ The existence of recorded versions of lectures can even prompt professors to change the substance of what they teach. An item in Inside Higher Ed confirmed that several participating professors no longer teach the OYC version of their course to Yale students: “Some have questioned whether the easy availability of course lectures might lead to lower attendance back at Yale, but [Professor Ramamurti] Shankar and [Professor Langdon] Hammer seem to have found a novel solution. ‘I will never teach this course again,’ said Shankar. . . . ‘I don’t know another way to do it.’ For similar reasons, Hammer said he will take a break from teaching the modern poetry course” captured on OYC—an internal curricular change that may have been an unintended consequence of a project aimed at external audiences.⁷

While lecture capture initiatives could potentially inspire modifications to elite institutions’ instructional models, the approach taken by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) seems to offer the greatest potential for large-scale transformative change. The other existing courseware initiatives profiled here provide only content; the OLI includes additional aspects of the learning experience, acting as lecture, textbook, and even assessor. The OLI project makes a convincing case that online teaching can achieve learning outcomes at least equal to those in a traditional classroom, improving educational productivity.⁸ But thus far, just as the content-only courseware models have not led to a rethinking of their host universities’ core curricula, so Carnegie Mellon has not used what it has learned from the OLI to re-engineer its approach to introductory courses for its own students.⁹

Using OLI courses as the sole means of instruction (or with very limited human support) would seem to have remarkable potential for easing bottlenecks in core courses or for cutting costs while preserving strong educational outcomes¹⁰—though whether the OLI model would prove effective for courses in the social sciences and humanities, or for more advanced courses, remains an open question. But cost savings through the use of online courseware can be realized only if and when institutions begin to fully integrate these resources into their present operations. As we have seen, highly selective universities have served as willing producers of online courseware content, but they have not yet elected to put it to transformative use on their campuses. Should a project like the OLI achieve widespread, transformative usage in formal settings, adoption is likely to come first from other institutions like large public universities or community colleges (where the OLI has already begun to find some traction).¹¹

Of course, universities face a series of ingrained cultural obstacles to large-scale changes in their pedagogical models. Thus, the reluctance to date by top-tier institutions—both public and private—to systematically implement OLI-style courseware in their everyday teaching is understandable. In addition to the expense that such an overhaul would involve,¹² there is hesitancy from a branding perspective. Such changes would require the selective university to upend—or at least adjust—the high-touch teaching model that has traditionally served its students well and has sustained its prestigious ranking.¹³ Furthermore, despite promising early data from projects like OLI, real pedagogical concerns remain for institutions naturally devoted to offering learning experiences of unassailable quality.

Perhaps most importantly, winning over faculty—especially in an area as closely guarded as teaching methods—could be another obstacle to such sweeping change. Generalized anxiety toward online education persists among faculty, particularly at those institutions where online tools and teaching methods are not ubiquitous.¹⁴ Faculty are likely to react with concern to perceived threats to the autonomy they have historically enjoyed over the development and delivery of their courses.¹⁵ David Noble has suggested that, in the most extreme cases, faculty may find that technology has rendered their services redundant—an obvious disincentive to adopting courseware as a central means of teaching.¹⁶

But while serious integration of online courseware into the primary undergraduate curriculum would be a significant departure for the most selective institutions, online courses are commonly offered for credit outside of this elite sector. According to a Sloan Consortium report on the status of online education, in the fall 2007 semester over 20 percent of U.S. students enrolled in higher education took an online course, a significant increase over the previous year.¹⁷ By 2009 that number had risen to one in four overall.¹⁸ Within the most selective institutions, though, such experiences remain quite rare, indicating the significant split between major research universities’ attitudes toward online courses for enrolled undergraduates and the broader trend in higher education toward online instruction.

That said, there have been some recent signs of change among selective institutions, with first movers coming from the more financially strained public university sector. In the fall of 2009 the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill initiated a pilot program to convert its introductory Spanish course to online-only after several years of teaching the course in hybrid mode. For that pilot, the department has eliminated face-to-face instruction in favor of online course videos, interactive modules, and interaction with peers and instructors via virtual communication environments. The department chair and head of the university’s Language Resource Center explained that student performance data had shown no significant difference between traditional and hybrid courses in the past, and that the switch to fully online instruction would relieve strains on space and funds in a difficult economic climate.¹⁹ For a selective state flagship like UNC to embrace such a model for enrolled undergraduates was a bold, newsworthy step. The outcome of this experiment will provide a chance to explore whether faculty concerns about course quality, curricular autonomy, and staff redundancies are warranted.

Dire financial need, coupled with the institutional mandate to provide access for in-state students, is also spurring conversations at the University of California about a pilot project to create and evaluate fully online courses.²⁰ These proposed courses could be offered for credit either to enrolled UC students or, eventually, as part of full online undergraduate degrees or a virtual campus that could help the system accommodate more students while collecting needed additional revenues. All-too-limited access to world-class higher education in India has similarly motivated the IITs’ plans to eventually utilize NPTEL content as the basis for a virtual IIT.²¹ When it comes to using technology to unlock the gates both to course content and to credit toward degrees, the elite public universities are leading the charge—perhaps as a natural outgrowth of the access component of their institutional missions.

The prospect of selective higher education using technology to innovate beyond the course level, to the point of granting full-fledged online degrees, raises a number of questions. For instance, if elite public university systems like the University of California and the IITs were to offer online-only undergraduate programs, would that jeopardize their appeal to their traditional student bodies? Would a student who is qualified to attend an elite university be interested in forgoing the residential experience in favor of an online-only option? How much less expensive would an online degree need to be to attract the best students in the absence of a residential component (or would the flexibility that a distance learning option affords make it more attractive)? And could the same quality standards be maintained, such that the online degrees from these institutions are not viewed as second-tier?²²

In order to evolve and expand current online courseware endeavors into more ambitious efforts like those proposed by the IITs and the University of California, additional features must be developed: enhanced interaction (presumably with an online system as well as instructors or teaching assistants), application processes, mechanisms for collecting tuition, and metrics for accreditation. When applied to distance education, these roles lie decidedly outside many traditional universities’ core competencies, and new entrants may therefore face stiff competition from more established providers. For-profit institutions (like the University of Phoenix)—as well as many state universities (the University of Maryland University College and the Penn State Global Campus are prominent examples)—have been involved with distance education for years. Their experience with online business and course delivery models, coupled with their tendency to offer more professionally oriented courses that have proved popular in the online environment, might offer superior positioning in this market.

Furthermore, a nimble for-profit institution—be it a commercial university or even a commercial textbook publisher²³—that attempts to productize and scale up online education efforts may have an advantage over a large and storied research university that is not set up for e-commerce.²⁴ Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton, expressed skepticism at a traditional university’s capacity to expand seamlessly into other areas. He pointed out that in deciding where to focus institutional resources, a university must consider what will support its public mission. “But you also have to ask yourself, where do we have the talent? You can’t just turn around tomorrow and say ‘maybe we should start doing something different’—you have to accumulate the talent first.”²⁵ Time will tell whether the historic strengths of these elite universities will be of value in the distance education market.

Should the highly selective institutions discussed here choose to make online education more central to their instructional models—either to better serve their current student body or to expand it—that move would also be a highly visible vote of confidence in online education itself. “Will [online education] continue [to be viewed] as suspect—the provenance of bottom-feeding for-profits?” asks Daniel Greenstein, the University of California’s vice provost for academic planning, programs and coordination, wondering if e-learning will perpetually be considered a second-rate option, appropriate for less selective institutions but not for the best of American higher education. “Online ed will not take off in the quality sector unless and until some leading universities integrate [it] into their traditional undergraduate curricula, not just for their enrolled or in-residence students who might benefit by having access to some required courses online, but as fully distance learning options.”²⁶ Describing highly selective institutions’ relatively slow adoption of online education to date, Anya Kamenetz writes that “There is snobbery at work: the vanguard of online programs are at colleges that offer only associate’s degrees. . . . Perhaps as a result, at traditional universities, digital offerings may be treated as an afterthought, a poor relation of what goes on in the classroom.”²⁷ If elite institutions like those profiled in this book were to fully embrace e-learning, that could go a long way toward establishing online courses as an expected and legitimate element of higher education, even at the most prestigious levels.²⁸

Elite universities developed online courseware initiatives to share their educational content with a world audience. But these projects’ transformative potential within the academy should not be discounted. At a time when the general state of the economy has put all nonessential university projects in jeopardy, demonstrating and enhancing the value that such programs provide to the institutions that created them—or to higher education more broadly—will no doubt be of utmost importance to these projects’ long-term success. As the attention of private foundations and federal agencies shifts toward open-education projects for or by community colleges rather than those based at elite institutions, existing online courseware initiatives will be presented with both opportunities for growth and new challenges.

The transformative impact of online courseware will vary tremendously by institutional type. Community colleges, small independent colleges, large public universities, and elite research institutions have varying needs, resource bases, and values that will dictate the degree and kind of usage that they choose to make of these materials and pedagogical approaches. But every tier of higher education stands to gain from the strategic implementation of some aspect of online courseware. Community colleges (and perhaps less-selective four-year institutions)—where access, efficiency, and affordability of education are central components of their missions—seem the most likely early adopters of online courseware to drive institutional transformation.

Some observers have even suggested that increased access to affordable educational materials via the internet may result in a more dramatic reconfiguration of higher education, as learners use these technologies to assemble their educational experiences from disaggregated parts. It may someday be commonplace, they hypothesize, for students to pick and choose online courses from several providers, seek credit for their learning from a separate source, and even sidestep the traditional student-teacher relationship entirely by finding peer support through online social networks. Recognition that the digital age might enable the unbundling of university functions—and possibly the impending ruination of the traditional university model—dates at least to the early dot-com period, though it has recently been expressed with mounting urgency.²⁹ But those who envision near-total dissolution of the university model often spare the most selective institutions from their provocative auguries (at least in the near term), conceding that the most elite research universities and liberal arts colleges offer a traditional residential experience and a prestigious degree that seems to have enduring value.³⁰ For the highly selective tier of higher education described in this book, threats to institutional livelihoods as a result of technologically mediated unbundling are far in the future (if present at all).

To date, the selective universities that have been the trailblazers in developing these courseware materials for the general public have been among the most reluctant to use them to reform their own pedagogical approaches. But even if the wealth and prestige of these selective institutions insulate them from the more extreme disaggregation that some predict will drive reform in other sectors, changing student needs and expectations—as well as pressures from the evolving higher-education landscape—may encourage implementation of these innovative methods. New technologies and strategies for disseminating course content could lead to educational experiences that look very different from those currently available at elite universities.

Such changes could result from any number of drivers: As tech-savvy students increasingly expect to access lecture content on demand, universities of any caliber will have to decide whether and how to meet these demands. Should online lectures come to serve as equivalent substitutes for in-person attendance, one might even imagine—perhaps far in the future—students at MIT being permitted to take online courses from Yale for credit toward their own degrees, and vice versa (a scenario close to what is already happening offline through intercollegiate consortial arrangements and study-abroad programs). Alternatively, budget crunches may eventually lead even the best-resourced universities to, as Bowen states in the foreword, “do more with less.” They might use online courseware to expand local capacity for key courses, or establish firmer partnerships with public institutions to see their courseware put to transformative use elsewhere. If substantively integrated into universities’ basic educational approaches, the lessons learned from the online courseware projects profiled here may alter the way in which higher education is administered and experienced—at the elite level and beyond.

¹ ‘This is true even though universities’ iTunes U and YouTube channels are often dominated by non-course-related content, such as captured special events, promotional materials, and performances, in addition to or in lieu of lectures (see Young, Jeffrey R., “College 2.0: More Professors Could Share Lectures Online: But Should They?” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, March 7, 2010).

² Interview with George Breslauer, 6/9/09.

³ Berkeley has long been interested in sharing some of its strategies for affordable course recording with others. In 2008 Berkeley and several partner institutions received planning grants from the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations to form the Opencast project, an online community of practice “to explore, define, and document podcasting best practices and technologies” (http://www.opencastproject.org/). According to Mara Hancock, Berkeley’s director of Educational Technology Services, the impetus behind Opencast was “enabling others also to scale and grow and make this more financially viable for more people” (interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09).

⁴ Leadership at highly selective public universities that have come under acute fiscal pressure may be more receptive to these changes; leaders of elite private universities have been less likely to view the application of online strategies toward these ends as relevant for them. As public universities build out capacity in this area, it will be interesting to see if their private counterparts eventually follow suit.

⁵ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/9/09.

⁶ See, for example, Hammond, Ruth, “Learning with ‘Clickers’ Gets Better after Peer Discussion, Wired Campus blog (Chronicle of Higher Education), January 7, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Learning-With-Clickers-/4456.

⁷ Guess, Andy, “Open Courses Open Wider,” Inside Higher Ed, December 12, 2007.

⁸ And teaching with OLI courses in hybrid mode, combining asynchronous digital learning with targeted course sessions (the latter available only to enrolled students), can be even more effective than the traditional method.

⁹ Some enrolled Carnegie Mellon students have been taught through substantial use of the OLI (for instance, in the head-to-head and accelerated studies conducted on the OLI statistics course), but the university has not habitually offered its students the option of taking courses in this format.

¹⁰ Carnegie Mellon cognitive scientist and OLI assessment expert Marsha Lovett has described a “minimal support” scenario for students affiliated with a college or university taking OLI courses. Under this scenario the OLI system enacts the instruction, but an instructor of record helps pace the student’s progress through the course; creates, administers, and grades in-class exams; monitors students’ progress; and holds an optional weekly Q&A session for students. (This is the approach taken to the experimental group in the OLI’s head-to-head study of student learning in statistics using the OLI; Lovett, Marsha, “Support Models for Teaching with OLI,” undated document.)

¹¹ The OLI statistics course is already being used in some community colleges, and interactions between community college faculty and the OLI production team should become more formalized through the Community College Open Learning Initiative project, which will be designed for a community college student population with cross-institutional development teams (interview with Candace Thille, 8/11/09).

¹² For any single institution, the economics of restructuring a suite of courses to be taught entirely OLI-style makes little sense: the upfront investment is too steep relative to the savings. Courses of this type are expensive to develop—each OLI course has cost roughly $500,000 to $1 million—but could potentially benefit vast numbers of students simultaneously. A collaborative business model to support cross-institutional development of courses may therefore be the solution, but it would require universities to enter into new partnerships. Major public university systems—in which multiple campuses already share some resources and work toward shared missions—may be a logical starting place to explore investments in a major overhaul like transforming introductory courses.

¹³ As Bowen notes in his foreword, for the most prestigious institutions, “Presenting some of their own on-campus courses in a strictly online mode could . . . compromise their ability to compete with other elite universities for the very best students—many of whom expect face-to-face contact with professors and regular in-class interactions with talented peers.”

¹⁴ Evidence for faculty fears of being replaced by technology have surfaced in the dissolution of the University of Illinois Global Campus, which curtailed its attempt to develop a for-profit, independently accredited online venture partially due to faculty’s wariness of such a program’s fit with the academic standards to which they were accustomed (Kolowich, Steve, “What Doomed Global Campus?” Inside Higher Ed, September 3, 2009).

¹⁵ As Martin Trow has suggested, “the idea of giving any teaching over to self-contained courseware . . . is at odds with the university’s traditions; it threatens its jealously defended reputation for a degree reflecting high academic standards” (Trow, Martin, “The Development of Information Technology in American Higher Education,” Daedalus 126, no. 4 [Fall 1997], 304).

¹⁶ Noble writes that “once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant, and when they leave, their work remains behind. . . . The new technology of education, like the automation of other industries, robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, the product of their labor, and, ultimately, their means of livelihood” (Noble, David F., “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education,” First Monday 3, no. 1 [January 5, 1998], http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/569/490).

¹⁷ Allen, I. Elaine, and Jeff Seaman, “Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008,” report supported by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group, November 2008, http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/staying_course, 5.

¹⁸ Allen, I. Elaine, and Jeff Seaman, “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009,” report supported by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group, January 2010, http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/learning_on_demand_sr2010, 1.

¹⁹ See Kolowich, Steve, “Adios to Spanish 101 Classroom,” Inside Higher Ed, October 21, 2009. Performance data on the hybrid version of the course were collected over several years as part of the Pew Program on Course Redesign. In the hybrid version (which is still being used for Spanish 102), two of the course’s four contact hours per week were replaced with online independent learning (“Colleagues Committed to Redesign: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Progress Report as of 3/1/08,” http://www.thencat.org/RedesignAlliance/C2R/R1/Abstracts/UNCCH_Abstract.htm).

The decision to convert introductory Spanish to online-only was made in the absence of data to shed light on whether this latest change would affect student learning. An independent evaluation team from UNC has been following student progress throughout the pilot (both tracking student performance on assessments and surveying student attitudes toward the course), and it will compare online-only students’ learning outcomes to those achieved in the past by students taking the course both in hybrid mode and traditionally. For the second semester of the pilot (Fall 2010), the Spanish department plans to tweak the course according to the evaluation committee’s recommendations, and it will decide after the completion of the pilot whether to institutionalize this approach to Spanish 101 (interview with Glynis Cowell, 4/30/10).

²⁰ University of California, University Committee on Educational Policy, “Online Undergraduate Instruction at a Selective University: An Intensive, Faculty-Led Evaluation of Opportunities, Challenges, Quality, Cost, and Viability,” draft prospectus, version 12, March 30, 2010, http://ccfit.ucdavis.edu/calendar/2009-10/docs/ucep%20project%20description%20final.pdf.

²¹ A virtual university was one element of the IITs’ initial proposal to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, but the Ministry directed the IITs to start with the content element only, which became the NPTEL project. In 2008, Dr. Surendra Prasad, director of IIT Delhi, told the Indian Express “there is a proposal to set up a virtual university, which is in the planning stage. We want at least 500 courses to be ready and uploaded on NPTEL by then. Universities in their present form may not be able to cope . . . with the increasing number of engineering students” (“IITs Plan to Set Up Virtual Universities, Labs,” Indian Express, online edition, April 26, 2008).

²² Various committees of the University of California faculty have been engaged in vigorous debate about online education. Discussions were initiated by the Academic Senate, which convened a Special Committee on Remote and Online Instruction and Residency, and by the university administration, which in the spring of 2010 framed the proposal to pilot and evaluate UC-designed, credit-bearing online undergraduate courses. Concern and skepticism from faculty have pervaded those discussions, particularly regarding the quality of potential online offerings relative to the high standards to which UC campuses have historically held themselves. UC Berkeley’s chair of the statewide Senate’s Committee on Educational Policy wrote that his Committee “remain[s] unconvinced that this is a desirable direction in which to go, much less that the faculty actually want to go there. . . . Learning material is not to be equated with getting a university degree. The social as well as educational growth of a student are intertwined and facilitated by being physically present on campus for at least a minimum amount of time. Without the student experience of campus life and face-to-face courses, a university degree becomes a commodity driven to the lowest common denominator. We do not believe a UC degree should be so devalued” (Navarrete, Ignacio, Committee on Educational Policy document contributed to “Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate Committee Responses to Remote and Online Instruction at UC,” http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/issues/Senate_Committee_Responses_to_Online_TF_Report.pdf). Nevertheless, the UC Academic Senate appears ready to explore the possibility of developing and evaluating online instruction.

²³ Commercial textbook publishers may constitute another source of competition for top universities in courseware creation. These experienced, well-capitalized professionals in information delivery have created a number of software options to supplement their textbooks that have much in common with the OLI. One example is MyMathLab, a customizable software suite by Pearson, which includes features designed for both students (such as guided practice problems that provide instant feedback) and teachers (such as course management software that allows them to convert assignments and tests to automatically graded online formats). (MyMathLab, “Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.mymathlab.com/faqs). Other likely competitors include for-profit companies like 2tor, to which universities can outsource the creation of their online curricula (http://2tor.com/about/), and StraighterLine, a for-profit set of courses that students pay to take independently and for which colleges can grant transfer credit (http://www.straighterline.com/). As entities like these proliferate—on the university side and the vendor side—it will be interesting to see if any fruitful synergies arise between courseware products made by the higher education community and those made for the higher education community by commercial producers.

²⁴ The traditional universities in which NPTEL and webcast.berkeley have been housed are large and established institutions that are not easily susceptible to change, so it is perhaps no surprise that representatives from these institutions have envisioned online-only degree-granting endeavors as separate entities—an eleventh UC campus rather than an e-Berkeley degree (see Edley, Christopher J., “Building a New UC—In Cyberspace,” Los Angeles Times, online edition, July 1, 2009) or a virtual IIT rather than an existing IIT awarding distance degrees. As Clayton Christensen has stated, “It is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well. Creating an independent organization, with a cost structure honed to achieve profitability at the low margins characteristic of most disruptive technologies, is the only viable way for established firms to harness this principle” (Christensen, Clayton M., The Innovator’s Dilemma, New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2006, xxiv).

This approach has been successful for public universities (the University of Maryland’s online degree option is exercised through its separate University College, and Penn State’s through its World Campus). Extension schools have also historically been sites for innovation at a slight distance from the main activities of the university, and could be ideal venues for migrating online courseware from enrichment-only to credit-bearing programs. Should UC’s proposed credit-bearing online courses eventually lead to online degrees from individual campuses—particularly the most prestigious ones like Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles—this would constitute a significant break from these universities’ traditional approach to core undergraduate teaching.

²⁵ Interview with Harold Shapiro, 7/24/08. As Diane Harley has written, the best traditional universities may not necessarily be the best or most successful at delivering online courseware: “E-learning programs vary greatly in quality and there is no clear correlation between quality and the prestige of the provider” (Harley, Diane, and Shannon Lawrence, “The Regulation of E-Learning: New National and International Policy Perspectives,” summary report on the proceedings of a meeting, September 2006, revised February 2007, http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROP.Regulation_of_elearning.pdf, 14).

²⁶ Personal communication with Daniel Greenstein, 2/26/10.

²⁷ Kamenetz, Anya, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, New York: Chelsea Green, 2010, 95.

²⁸ Harley writes that “in the global marketplace, there is an underlying sense of risk, especially in terms of reputation and prestige, which has resulted in cautious undertakings. The result is that many ‘prestigious’ institutions have been very selective of markets that they have entered and the programming that they have made available. As e-learning grows, however, more well-known institutions will likely enter the e-learning marketplace, lending prestige to e-learning in general” (Harley and Lawrence, “The Regulation of E-Learning,” 15). Kamenetz makes the point even more forcefully, asserting that “It would just take a few more prestigious institutions getting on board to change the way people feel about online, on-demand education” (Kamenetz, DIY U, 128).

²⁹ See, for example, Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid, “Universities in the Digital Age,” Change 28, no. 4 (August 1996), 10–19, in which the authors reference the view held by some that the brick-and-mortar universities will give way entirely to virtual entities (though they take a more tempered view). More recently, Kevin Carey has gone so far as to say that, if undergraduate education—the tuition fees from which have subsidized other university functions—can be cobbled together more cheaply and easily outside the traditional institution, it “could be the string that, if pulled, unravels the carefully woven financial system on which the modern university depends. Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes,” and “less-selective private colleges and regional public universities . . . are in real danger” (Carey, Kevin, “What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, April 3, 2009).

³⁰ For examples in which commentators have identified this trend but included the caveat that the most prestigious, best-resourced institutions will likely be spared from any resulting fallout, see Carey, Kevin, “College for $99 a Month,” Washington Monthly, online edition, September–October 2009; Kamenetz, DIY U; and Teachout, Zephyr, “A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges,” Washington Post, online edition, September 13, 2009.