With the rise of digital video recorders, movies on demand and TV show reruns online, consumers have more power to choose when to catch their entertainment — and when it comes to education, students want the same options.
Just as the entertainment industry had to adapt to new technology, the higher education industry has to adapt, said James Hilton, the vice president and chief information officer at the University of Virginia.
Higher education has experienced disruptive forces over the years. For instance, he said, World War II and the GI Bill of Rights produced a large number of research universities.
Hilton also contends that four forces are disrupting higher education and pressuring it to change: unbundling, demand pull, ubiquitous access and the rise of the pure property view of ideas. Students want to choose how they learn, what they learn and where they learn. They also want to protect their ideas.
The next era of education will likely be the age of the nontraditional student, Hilton said. College graduates will change jobs and careers many times, which will drive the demand for continuing education. They may not be able to relocate or take classes at a residential campus, Hilton said, so they will turn to online classes or a combination of online and face-to-face classes.
Face-to-face education will focus on project-based learning. Undergraduate education will become increasingly interactive, with less lecture and recitation, and more collaborative problem solving, Hilton said.
“The pressure for on-demand learning is going to come from nontraditional students," he said, "and it’s going to increase dramatically during economic downturns.”
At the end of the Industrial Age, many people say the world entered an Information Age — defined by the manipulation of information and the ease by which it can be re-routed, thanks to the Internet.
However, Christine Borgman at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said that although the speed of information has accelerated, access to it has been available for more than 500 years.
"When books came into a port, the local rulers wouldn't let the books back out until they'd been copied by hand," she said. "Today's notion that we can create a record of all the books ever published is not at all a new idea."
For Borgman, a professor and the presidential chair of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, global access is more limited than one would assume.
"Not everyone in the world can hop on the Internet," she said. "Because so much is available online, there's a false sense of security — very little is free-of-charge. What we've created is not better intelligence, but we've created a sewer where people can swim."
Because there are individuals, especially in work environments and learning institutions, who rely on their Internet access, Borgman said the world needs digital-content curators. She said that if people hope to make today's data useful for future decision-makers, it needs to be taken care of so those people can access it later.
"It's one thing to store it," she said. "It's another thing entirely to organize it. You have to keep migrating it to the next technology as they become available. All too often, people are creating data and not thinking about its life cycle. Other stuff is just being allowed to rot without professional decisions. This is a time to take advantage of the data that exists."
