The Temptation of Innovation

by Bill Noblitt

National experts say that higher education in general must become innovative or die, and they believe that universities like Stetson are no exception.

“To play its indispensable function in the new competitive environment, the typical university must change more quickly and more fundamentally than it has been doing,” write Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring in The Innovative University. “Economists teach that disruptive innovation by newcomers and creative destruction of entrenched incumbents lead to better products and services.”

They applaud for-profit universities as disruptors that are changing the way students are educated.

Edison to compact flourescent“Of course, we want to embrace innovation, but only innovation that fits Stetson,” says Wendy B. Libby, Ph.D., president of Stetson University. “And private liberal education isn’t broken.

“We have to be very skeptical about management theories applied to what we do,” Libby adds. “We are already seeing Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory losing adherents in our industry; likewise with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).”

However, Libby believes that we should weave innovation into the fabric of the place. “We must honor the past,” she says, “but write the future.”

Innovate or Die

Christensen hasn’t had a good few weeks. For example, a recent New Yorker article all but calls his research spurious.

“Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety and shaky evidence,” reports Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. “Ever since (Christensen’s book) The Innovator’s Dilemma, everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted.”

“There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars,” the New Yorker article notes. “The University of Southern California is beginning a new degree program on the topic of disruption. And there’s Big Bang disruption and disruption so bad that it isn’t even disruptive innovation any longer but devastating innovation.”

On the other hand, The Economist magazine cover story argues that “a revolution has begun, thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.”

Even Christensen admits that “federal financial aid seems to have gummed up the disruption: The easy revenue has encouraged some schools to indiscriminately enroll, often at the expense of quality, and has discouraged cost reduction.” For example, some former for-profit Wall Street darlings, such as Corinthian Colleges, have crashed and burned.

However, many innovation experts have put higher education on notice. For instance, The Economist magazine offers this warning if universities don’t embrace innovative disruption: “The Internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing upside down, will upend higher education. Now the MOOC, or ‘Massive Open Online Course,’ is offering students the chance to listen to star lecturers and get a degree at a fraction of the cost of attending a university.

“But mediocre universities may suffer the fate of many newspapers,” the magazine article continues. In that environment, “universities’ revenues would fall by more than half, employment in the industry would drop by nearly 30 percent and more than 700 institutions would shut their doors. The rest would need to reinvent themselves to survive.

“Like all revolutions, the one taking place in higher education will have victims.”

Christensen piles on and calls MOOCs “a potent ‘disruptive technology’ that will kill inefficient universities. Fifteen years from now, more than half of the universities (in America) will be in bankruptcy,” he warns.

How scary.

MOOCs Force Change

After the 2008 economic collapse, many universities and colleges, especially private ones, suffered a financial downfall not seen since the Great Depression. Some universities and colleges then joined or renewed their efforts in the online game, hoping to boost revenue through an untapped source.

In fact, The New York Times called 2012 the Year of the MOOC. California Gov. Jerry Brown praised them as central to democratizing education.

Productivity and cost-cutting are two key business terms that have bled into higher education. Therefore, many innovation experts look at online as a way to control tuition costs at the nation’s colleges and universities.

Butterfly and chrysallisYou can teach many more students in MOOCs than you can in a typical classroom, thus cutting costs per student, but many believe higher education isn’t asking the right questions.

“The problem with this MOOC-as-labor-issue argument is that it has no place for students and learning,” says Phil Hill, an education technology consultant. “Our starting point ought to be what students need and whether this is an effective form of learning.”

In addition, studies have pointed to the downside of buying into the online model. Completion rates and grades are often worse than traditional campus-style classes, according to a University of Pennsylvania study, and MOOCs have few active users. About half who registered for a class ever viewed a lecture and only garnered a 4-percent completion rate across all courses.

In that study, students complained about the lack of human connection.

“MOOCs are not innovative, and online education is old technology,” declares Ball. “The problem is that innovation is associated with the latest technology, and innovation doesn’t mean grab the next BIG thing and use it in the classroom. Saying ‘me, too’ is not innovative.”

Echoing the University of Pennsylvania study, Ball says, “There’s just minimal engagement with faculty in a MOOC or sometimes in online education in general.”

“I am like a lot of traditional faculty who are not terribly convinced by how MOOCs are going to help Stetson or its students,” declares Eugene Huskey, Ph.D., the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair and professor of political science. “We are dealing with undergraduates who are 18 and 19 years old who you need to look in the eye and see where they are.”

Online Education in Decline?

It strikes Huskey that MOOCs, online education in general and the for-profits “may be on the decline because we are beginning to understand the negatives of these initiatives.” Stetson has four totally online degrees — Master of Laws (LL.M.), Elder Law (LL.M.), the MBA-Pharmacology, and a Master of Accounting. And during the summer, the university offers several undergraduate online courses.

“Can we truly be innovative in this area?” asks Sue Ryan, the Betty Drees Johnson Dean of the duPont-Ball Library. Ryan has been charged with developing a proposal for new online course offerings, but she looks at online education as an “old technology,” too. She doesn’t want this way of offering courses to hamper Stetson’s reputation as a residential university campus that offers a challenging and personal education to motivated undergraduates and graduates.

“We have to remember what Stetson does well and not do anything to muck that up,” Ryan adds. “Let’s create students who think critically, who can write clearly and with vigor, and who can speak compellingly.

“We already do this quite well,” she says. Her goal is to take that first-rate Stetson education and go after an entirely different audience online. “We will go after a more mature population probably for certificates and master’s,” she explains. “But if it’s an inferior product, we will shoot ourselves in the foot. Therefore, we need to proceed carefully.”

Bill Noblitt is editor of Stetson Magazinewhere you can read this complete article.