Seven Things Higher Education Innovators Want You to Know
Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016
“If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
“Our society is evolving much more rapidly than any institution of higher education,” Crow said, pointing out that the current production of college degrees in the U.S. is woefully behind population growth. To achieve its goals in graduation rates, higher education needs a new wave of innovation, he said, citing his own university’s efforts to create a new model of education where “full immersion and digital immersion are possible, costs are constrained and the scale is all scales, from individual learner to massive groups of learners, all operating at the same time.”
Crow outlined a framework for innovation wherein knowledge is emphatically at the center of every educational enterprise, “like a black hole of unbelievable intense energy.” Built around that, he said, are immersive, technology-enhanced learning (both on-campus and online), massive-scale learning, and the concept of education through exploration. “Now there are no more teachers, no more professors at the front of the stage — they are engaged in the creation of learning environments that allow people to learn at scales and in ways that have previously been not possible.”…