Friday, September 25, 2009

Action Analytics: Setting a National Agenda

I have just returned from three days at the first National Symposium on Action Analytics. In a short time, great strides were made in framing, shaping, and advancing this critical topic.

The event was co-sponsored by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and Capella University. This is the first time a major public university system and a for-profit university have collaborated on a venture such as this, seeking to attract thought leaders, practitioners, policy makers, and visionaries to frame a national agenda for advancing action analytics as an instrument and inititaive to support the nation's education, training, and workforce development imperatives.

The core planning and facilitaton team for the Symposium consisted of Dr. Linda Baer, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs, Minnesota State Colleges and universities; Dr, Michael Offerman, Vice Chairman of Capella Educational Company; Dr. Mark Milliron, Founder aqnd CEO of Catalyze Learning International; and Donald M. Norris, President of Strategic Initiatives, Inc.

The symposium was supported by two white papers, "Why Action Analytics for Higher Education?" and "Linking Analytics to Lifting out of Recession." The sessions consisted of a series of panels, presentations, and conversations about current best practices in analytics; what information, reports, and dashboards are needed; building analytics to support institutional and public policy; and building the next generation of educational technology tools to support action analytics. The final half day was spent discussing the issues relating to a national agenda for action analytics. This provided input to the core team who will prepare a draft white paper summarizing the need for and elements of a national agenda.

Future blogs will present the elements of the national agenda as they are framed, funded, and advanced.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Why Higher Education Must Transform, Post Recession


I just returned from the 2009 Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship in Kentucky, whose theme was “Raising the Bar: Access, Quality, and Success”. This Conference was hosted by the Kentucky Council for Postsecondary Education (CPE).

I had the privilege and pleasure of addressing the new trustees on the topic of “Re-imagining Higher Education, Post-Recession.” In the conversations with the trustees, we explored many of the topics, perspectives, and initiatives that have been featured on this blog over the past few months.

Many of the trustees are seasoned business persons and/or community leaders whose enterprises and local communities are undergoing their own reimagining processes. From their own experiences, many trustees appreciated that the one-two-three punch we have discussed in previous blogs could be applied to lifting out of recession:

• Aggressively harvesting productivity gains to improve efficiency and effectiveness;

• Leveraging innovation and transformation to change the nature of products, services, and experiences offered by enterprises and how they align with emerging marketplace realities and the changing value preferences of customers and stakeholders; and

• Seeking new revenue sources and fresh variations on existing revenue streams.

Yet several questions kept recurring. Why hasn’t transformation succeeded more broadly in higher education before now and what new tools and practices will make this possible? What is it about today’s external and internal conditions that can be leveraged to motivate colleges and universities to re-imagine themselves for the post-recession world? How can inertia be overcome?

To answer these questions, I took a brisk walk through recent history, describing the evolution of the tools of re-imagination and transformation. As benchmarks, I used three books published over the past 13 years by the Society for College and University Planning, which captured the evolution of the tools of transformation.


Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century - The Vision and the Voice. In 1995, Michael Dolence and I wrote Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century. In this book, we projected the substantial growth in post-secondary learning that was likely to occur by the year 2000 to meet the needs of the workforce. We projected the robust growth in the number of new learners both in the USA and internationally that would be required to meet the needs of the Information Age.

By our reckoning, it would be practically and financially infeasible to meet these needs through building traditional campuses and proceeding with the traditional “factory” model of higher education, which was based on the familiar processes and practices where teaching, learning, assessment, and certification are bundled together in classrooms directed by traditional faculty.



The Transforming Higher Education model suggested realigning higher education to meet the needs of the workforce and the changing perspectives of learners. This would involve redefining, redesigning, and reengineering processes and practices to create fast, fluid, and flexible educational options for learners. These options would have to range from the traditional to the transformed. We suggested that new technologies were evolving that would enable the deconstruction and reengineering of higher education, elements key to re-imagination. Our model arrived on the scene just as the tools were developing that would eventually sustain the World Wide Web – the Web browser, high-speed Internet access from/to homes and businesses, the consistency of Internet standards such as HTTP and HTML, and the wonderful facility of search and interactivity. The Web and its associated capabilities would become a fundamental enabler of deconstruction and reinvention of educational processes and practices.

Transforming Higher Education appeared in the same year that William J. Baumol and Sue Anne Batey Blackman wrote “How to Think About Rising College Costs” in Planning for Higher Education. In this seminal article, they observed that higher education and health care were “handicraft” professions which had not been transformed by the application of technology-enabled productivity gains. Products, services and experiences in other industries were being reinvented to reduce cost and enhance value, unlike health care and education. As a result, healthcare and education became and continued to become increasingly more expensive compared to everything else in the market basket of services.

If past trends were to continue, Baumol and Bateman extrapolated that the combination of education and health care could rise from 20% of GDP in 1990 to over 50% by 2040. Clearly, these escalating costs would be difficult to sustain, a point that has been affirmed by the current health care debate and by progressive cuts in the relative support of public higher education over the past 20 years.

Put simply, for fifteen years we have recognized the appeal of transforming higher education and the increasingly unsustainable nature of financing for handicraft approaches to health care and education. But we lacked the tools and practices to transform and the collective will to challenge practices that had made us successful. After all American higher education reigned as the global leader in quality rankings and in the educational attainments of our population. Absent an immediate crisis or a clear external threat to mobilize our energies and diminish our over-confidence, American higher education proceeded on its time-honored path.

Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing – The Web-based Tools of Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice. In 2001, Jon Mason and Paul Lefrere and I wrote Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge. This book described the emergence of the Internet culture and “Web 1.0,” the first generation of highly facilitated knowledge sharing in combination with easy and continuous interactivity, all based on the World Wide Web.

This book suggested that the combination of knowledge sharing services and pervasive social interactivity were gestating a new generation of online “communities of practice.” These communities would enable enterprises, professional disciplines, industries, and even regions or nations to provide perpetual learning experiences that fused with work, learning, knowledge building, and practice. Such communities of practice could prove to be fast, fluid, flexible, and affordable in ways that traditional higher education could not.

Our view was that Web-based engagement and interactivity were powerful instruments for transformation and re-imagination of perpetual, lifelong learning. We predicted that learning enterprises would experience cascading cycles of reinvention in their best practices for e-learning, knowledge management, and shareable educational resources. This would result in reinvented strategies and business models for e-learning, as well.

Transforming e-Knowledge anticipated the further evolution of Web 1.0 into Web 2.0, which enabled both the spontaneous and purposeful creation of social networks and open educational resources. Web 2.0 has also provided the means to provide rapid competence development for enterprises or other groups facing major dislocations and the need for speedy adaptation of new perspectives and practices. The open educational resources (OER) movement is most recognizably demonstrated by the OpenCourseWare Initiative, through which leading institutions like MIT and Carnegie Mellon University are making their entire body of course knowledge and tradecraft available to the world, for free.

These movements associated with Web 2.0 are key ingredients in the ultimate transformation of elements of higher education. They are creating the capacity to deconstruct educational delivery and interactivity and to create dramatically less expensive and more flexible options than the traditional higher education model. The availability of re-imagined options will percolate through higher education, resulting in a multitude of combinations and permutations of learning, demonstration of accomplishment, and certification. Operating within this marketplace of choices, learners, employers, policy makers and other stakeholders will decide which customized options meet their particular needs.

A Guide to Planning for Change – Combining Analytics and Alignment in Leading and Navigating Change. Web 2.0 provided the means for transforming learning and fusing work, learning and practice in ways that have never been possible. In addition, Web 2.0 has enabled the emergence of a new generation of analytics that allow leaders to focus on performance and value to shape the re-imagination of higher education.

In 2008 Nick Poulton and I published A Guide to Planning for Change, which prepared educational planners for crafting and executing strategy and building organizational capacity in the context of today’s changing environment for learning and work.

The major contribution of this book to the toolkit of transformation is its recognition that institutional leaders will need to enhance their use of analytics substantially in order to lead and navigate institutions into a sustainable future. This will require developing a strong culture of performance measurement and improvement. It will also require the careful combination of the tools of analytics with tools of alignment so measurement against targets can be aligned with institutional strategies and refined as the strategies are executed.

Put simply, these books illustrate three underlying forces or developments driving or enabling transformation of higher education:

• The fact that traditional approaches to teaching and learning are financially not sustainable as the means for addressing the boundless requirements of global, perpetual learning, cradle through career;

• Web-enabled revolutions in knowledge sharing and interactivity enable the deconstruction of traditional learning models and the creation new community-based modes of learning; and

• The capacity of Web-enabled analytics to illuminate performance and value are key factors in making the case for transformation and redefining financial sustainability.

The importance of these factors has been multiplied by the stunning events of 2008-2009, when we were hit both with financial disaster and the realization that we have squandered our lead as the global leader in mass education.

The Perfect Storm Arrives – the Great Recession, the Affordability Crisis, and Declining American Competitiveness. The collapse of the financial markets in 2008 and the resulting “Great Recession” hit higher education hard: reductions in state appropriations for public institutions, dramatic cuts in investment income that have most dramatically impacted private institutions, and traumatic declines in the capacity of parents and students to pay for higher education, today and continuing into the future. This affordability crisis will likely continue and perhaps worsen even after economic conditions improve.

The third element of this “Perfect Storm” has been the realization that the United States has lost competitive bragging rights to being the most highly educated nation. A fundamental ingredient in America’s economic strength, post-WW II, has been our investment in higher education, especially mass public higher education. We led the world in the percentage of young people going college and graduating. But over the past two decades, industrialized nations in Europe and Asia have invested heavily in education and some have surpassed us by some measures. We are now 14th in college attendance rates and our current generation of young people promises to the first that is less well-educated than their parents.

We are all familiar with the short-term adjustments pummeling campuses today: financial rescissions, travel freezes, short-term fixes, competing for and leveraging stimulus money, lay-offs, furloughs, pay cuts, creative approaches to financial aid, continuing to increase tuition to fill the gaps, compressing the time for an undergraduate degree from four (or more) to three years, and enrollment shifts to less-expensive institutions. In the short-run, financial exigency and expediency seem to be trumping innovation on many campuses. But campus financial officers anticipate worse budgetary challenges in two to three years, when stimulus money is gone. Moreover, demands for transparency and accountability are growing. .

To reclaim financial sustainability in the future, institutions will need to pursue aggressive, mixed strategies of operational efficiency, innovation, transformed and re-imagined processes and practices, and fresh revenues. Our current Perfect Storm of financial and competitive bad news opens the door to opportunities to overcome persistent resistance to change in higher education and to establish the financial sustainability that has eluded us for the past 15 years.

Transformation and Reimagination, Post-Recession. The call to transform higher education has attracted more and more supporters over the past 15 years. . Some innovations have scaled to entire institutions and flourished. Yet many other innovative and transformative projects in higher education have been “one-off” successes that have failed to be replicated by others. The following green shoots of transformation have appeared and spread around the higher education landscape,[you’ve already alluded to ‘green’] heralding future, enterprise-wide efforts:

• For-profit universities (e.g., University of Phoenix, Capella University, Strayer University, and a host of others) and public/private institutions that act like for-profits (e.g., Western University of Maryland University College, Regis University) have deconstructed and reinvented the traditional university model, deploying different best practices, strategies, and business models; many of these have been able to charge premium prices for their offerings; the for-profit higher education sector has been the fastest growing sector in higher education and its de facto skunk works;

• Some of these online institutions have taken a strong competence-based approach (e.g., Capella University, Western Governors University), leading to consistency of outcomes, demonstrable competences, and template/rubric-based grading and assessment;

• Disruptive innovators like Lamar University, on-line tutoring providers from India, and other on-line providers have offered re-imagined, online offerings at dramatically lower price points from traditional providers and even existing on-line providers; these are the harbingers of a coming generation of lower-price, “good enough” providers;

• Innovations in e-learning and blended learning have exposed most institutions and faculty to new approaches to digital scholarship and learning; some universities have formed unsuccessful online universities (e.g., University of Illinois Global Campus) while others have been successful (e.g. UMass Online);

• Carol Twigg and the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) have established a solid, decade-long record of utilizing technology and faculty engagement to reinvent courses, dramatically changing patterns of interactivity and in the process reducing costs and improving student performance; these individual-course-based reinventions have been expanded in some cases to entire institutions (University of Hawaii) and even systems of institutions (University of North Carolina System);

• Many institutions (e.g., University of Wisconsin System, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities) have established successful collaborative degree programs and programmatic networks in high demand areas such as nursing; such collaborations set the stage for serious consideration of consolidating learning resources between institutions, and reducing the span of disciplines covered by faculty in particular institutions (e.g., Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education);

• The open educational resources movement (OER) has grown dramatically, providing open courseware and resources that are being embedded in course experiences across the world; President Obama plans to fund $500 M to expand the use of open educational resources to increase the reach and richness of open education resources; the extension of open resources into social networking-based learning experiences are being prototyped by Peer2Peer University and other fledgling organizations that seek to enable learners to mash-up courses of their own, demonstrate mastery, and achieve certification for learning, outside of a traditional university framework; and

• New approaches to green careers networks and communities are germinating across education and the workplace, breaking down normal institutional and employer boundaries; these include social networking-based communities.

Across the country, the institutional leaders with whom I have spoken have used the past year to cut, stabilize and respond to their institution’s Perfect Storm. This fall they seem poised to embark on serious efforts to re-imagine how their institutions need to function in 2020 to be successful and financially sustainable. They are poised to aggressively undertake actions over the next several years to put them on that path.

Monday, September 7, 2009

What Value-Based Questions Would Prospective Students Ask?

If students and their parents were evaluating institutions on value, what questions would they expect to have answered by institutions? Consider the following:

• What percentage of students like me (based on my high school GPA and test scores) graduate with a bachelors degree in dour years? What are the average, cumulative student loan burdens for students like me at graduation (given my average family income)?

• How satisfied are students like me with their experience at your institution? How do you know? Are the results posted on your Website?

• What percentages of your students work while attending colleges? What work study programs and other programs do you offer to enable students to pay for part of their education?

• What percentage of your graduates are employed six months after graduation? How satisfied are they? How did you find out?

• How do you assure that academic offerings in the programs I am interested in are aligned with the needs of employers and the marketplace? How do you know you are succeeding?

• Can students achieve a baccalaureate in three years at your institution (or even less)? How about a 3+2 or 2+2 masters degree (and in what disciplines)? Do you have pathways, bridging, concurrent enrollment and articulation programs with local K-12 schools, community colleges, and other institutions? How about cooperative education programs (and I what disciplines)?

• What mechanism and support services are provided to monitor and support student success – in real time? What are your career planning and placements services like? How highly do they rank in comparison with other schools?

• Does your institution offer “no frills” options? Do you offer a menu of optional learning and experiential electives (e.g., internships, study-abroad, collaborative networks and joint enrollment with international institutions)for extra fees?

• Will your institution allow mw to take online courses from other providers if you are not able to schedule an adequate offering of the courses I need to stay on track with my degree plan? How does this work? Do you utilize relationships with other institutions to provide specialty courses that are not in your catalogue or not available when I will need them?

• What does your institution do to hold down the cost of books, course materials, and “fees”? Do you provide online resources rather than expensive textbooks? Do you provide students with a range of cost options?

• Can I utilize online and/or hybrid courses, coupled with creative scheduling, so that I only need to come to campus one day a week? Why not?

Once enrolled, value-drive institutions are keen on maximizing their opportunities for success. They would expect their institution to provide support services and retention-building analytics and be able to answer the following questions:

• How am I succeeding in this class compared to my classmates? How does my performance compare with students who have taken this course in the past?

• What patterns of engagement have characterized students who have been successful in the past? How does this compare with my record? (e.g., participation in institutional activities, engagement in and use of online resources and materials, other factors)

• In my degree program, what levels of engagement, academic performance, and other factors have led to graduates who were successful in graduating and achieving employment (e.g., results derived from data mining and meta-analysis)

• What importance have co-curricular activities played in the academic and employment success of past graduates? Do you have evidence?

• What competences (e.g., disciplinary knowledge, communication, teamwork, leadership, and others) have employers specified as important for graduates in my major? How can I demonstrate my proficiency and accomplishments in these competences?

Not all students will be strongly value-driven. Some will seek educational and developmental experiences that are highly traditional. But more and more, learners and their parents will select institutions based on their capacity to delivery not just quality – but value.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Reimagining Higher Education Based on Value (3)

This is the third and final blog on this topic – at least for now. We will revisit this topic again, soon.

I’ll begin by referencing a provocative article, “the good enuf rvlutn” in this month’s Wired magazine by Senior Editor, Robert Capps.

Good Enough is Preferable for Many Products and Experiences. The basic premise of the article is that ubiquitous Web tools are succeeding by providing experiences that are “Good Enough.” Web-based disruptive technologies furnish consumers with a variety of product and service options and consumers are consistently choosing the ones that are not the highest quality, in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, they are choosing the options that provide accessibility, the new killer app. Accessibility is reflected in ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. The Web makes it easier to achieve all of these.

So MP3 tunes replace higher fidelity CD music; Hulu provides access to lower definition TV on your computer, whenever you want it; Kindle provides a reading experience without complex graphics and art but with instant portability for hundreds of titles; netbooks offer puny computing capabilities, but appeal due to accessibility and price; and virtual trade shows powered by solicitous sales avatars are expected to grow 500% this year, fueled by economic concerns and the desire to do business at bargain basement prices.

The same reasoning applies to physical products, such as Single Use Digital Cameras and stripped-down camcorders (Pure Digital’s Flip Ultra). Light and nimble products are highly popular in the afterglow of the worst economic downturn in 70 years.

The Good Enough effect is also reflected in more serious minded concerns, like healthcare. For example, consider a new initiative by Kaiser Permanente, the largest not-for profit medical organization in the country. For years, Kaiser Permanente has relied on building complete, self-sustaining hospitals, employing 50 doctors or more, offering one-stop shopping for a region. But since Kaiser has digitized all patient records, prescriptions, and supporting information, it could consider a distributed model of linking regional hospitals to smaller community-based clinics. So it has started to establish two-person micro-clinics in strip malls. These clinics can perform 80% of the functions. No pharmacy, no radiology, no receptionist – just a full-service kiosk. To receive services not provided by the local clinic, Kaiser members can go to a full-service Kaiser regional facility if they need one. The prototype has worked well and functions at roughly half the per-member cost of a regular Kaiser facility. Adapting this model will enable Kaiser to attract and serve many additional members – all at a reduced overall cost. It's building the first prototype in Hawaii.

So “Good Enough” is right for the times. Web 2.0-based technologies reinvent physical products and Web-based experiences, and redefine “value” for customers that value accessibility, convenience, and a lower price. Given options, people choose the alternative that best fits their personal value proposition. Good enough is not just satisfactory; it is often preferable. Unneeded "quality" is both wasteful and unnecessary in many situations.

Starting Off the Radar Screen. The Good Enough effect is the heart of Clayton Christensen’s message about disruptive innovations. Such innovations often start by offering existing customers greater convenience and amenity, making up for what they lack in “quality” by the traditional meaning of the term in that setting. Or they reach potential customers that have not been able to achieve or afford access to the existing offerings. Often these solutions develop off the radar screen of the market leaders. But they don’t stay there for long.

Good Enough in Higher Education – One-Stop Shopping. Higher education has seen Good Enough in operation for some time. In the late 1980’’s the University of Delaware used the occasion of implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to re-imagine its approach to student services. It reconsidered the conditions under which students needed to talk to student services and policy specialists. Using the capacity of the new IT systems to manage and share knowledge more effectively, the University restored and converted an historic school house near campus to serve as a “one-stop-shop center” for student services. Rather than talking to specialized student affairs professionals, students were to meet with cross-trained customer service professionals who used the ERP systems to address every student need from parking tickets to pre-registration advice. Students needing real policy expertise were referred to policy specialists, over in the administration building. Students loved the convenience and didn’t mind talking to non-experts to solve most problems, then accepting a referral when necessary. Good Enough was, sure enough, good enough.

Over time, students began to access the university's on-line systems while waiting in line for a customer service agent, using the terminals lkining the walls in the one-stop center. Progressively, more and more forms, processes and procedures were moved on-line, and students made another “good enough” choice: they migrated from assisted service to self-service. Today, the University seeks to achieve the “90-8-2” standard: 90% of student problems can be solved in a full self-service mode, 8 % require some minimal assistance by staff, and 2% require a serious support effort by an expert staff person. The one-stop shop has been again transformed by “good enough.”

Good Enough in Learning. For the past two decades, many colleges and universities have been progressively increasing their use of adjunct faculty and shifting the balance of their faculty and teaching staff rosters. Driven inexorably by the need to control costs, adjuncts have proven “good enough” as part of the faculty mix.

The “good enough” concept has also been deployed in reinventing academic courses. The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has utilized technology-enabled redesign to shift responsibilities from full-time faculty in traditional lectures to teaching assistants, mentors, and other staff or to avatars, intelligent agents, bodies of knowledge, and other means of accessing knowledge, answering questions, and building competence. The roles of faculty have been deconstructued and reconstruicted in a multitude of combinations. All of these reinventions have been engineered by faculty working with the NCAT team. The “studio model for teaching mathematics has been particularly successful, producing better results (faster learning, higher proficiency) at lower costs. Sometimes “good enough” has proven actually to be better.

The academic model followed by the Western Governors’ University, University of Phoenix, and British Open University have all deconstructed and reinvented the role of faculty. The traditional model held that top quality was assured by having full-time faculty, content experts responsible for course design, instruction, testing, mentoring, and certification of competence. The deconstructed model used a single body of knowledge and standards of learning for all instances of a course, and used faculty as mentors to guide learners along their path. The result has been greater student satisfaction, consistency, and lower cost. All around, a better value.

There are still some faculty skeptics who believe that the only way to assure a “quality” result in learning is to have a full-time faculty content expert standing in front of a class of 25 students. But the truth is that technology enables other options that are not just “good enough” but often a much better value.

The Opportunity: Deconstructing and Experimenting with New Value Options. In earlier blogs we discussed the opportunity provided by President Obama’s plans to invest $500 M in developing open course materials, building on the open courseware materials developed by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and other institutions.

If these enhanced materials were made available as a utility to institutions all over the United States (and the world), they could create a pool of reimagined online courses that could become a critical part of the offerings in high schools, colleges and universities, corporate learning settings, and competence building in other settings. Some institutions could agree to use this body of knowledge and practice in all instances of its courses on particular subjects, and reinvent the roles of faculties and mentors, driving down the tuition that would be needed to be charged for such courses. Consider the following virtuous possibilities made possible by such a network of reimagined practices:

• Institutions could rethink and simplify their course offerings, especially in the core curriculum, and increase their flexibility; hybrid courses could become standard practice;

• Institutions could build greater flexibility into their ability to grow enrollments in particular courses, given the relative ease of rolling out additional online sections, themselves, or relying on other online providers;

• Participating institutions could provide their online resources and faculty mentors to be part of an “electricity grid for elearning” where demand greater than can be met by local resources in institutions could be furnished by surplus supply from other institutions or by institutions that consciously build surplus capacity;

• Institutions could reduce their own course offerings in disciplines where they were weak and provide the stronger offerings from other institutions; and

• Institutions could guarantee the ability of students to enroll in the courses they need, when they need then and even enable registering in advance to secure a full year’s schedule.

To provide optimal value, these offerings would need to be made available at reduced price points.

A Bonus for Public Institutions: The Ability to Grow on Tuition Alone. One of the banes of public colleges and universities has been the roller coaster ride of state funding: up in economic good times, down in recessions, requiring mid-year cuts, rescissions, and freezes. Such institutions often end up trimming course offerings at the very time that enrollment demand is rising.

If an electricity grid for learning infrastructure were in place it could utilize cadres of adjunct faculty, mentors and practitioners under the supervision of seasoned faculty, and reduce the marginal cost/price of rolling out an additional section to the point where it was less that the tuition price. In this circumstance, enrollments could grow even in economic downtimes.

Some variation on this theme must be part of a sustainable financial solution for public colleges and universities, moving forward. Institutions need to have the flex and access to surplus supply to be able to accommodate learner needs. Suppose an institution has 10 additional interested students for a section of Econ 101, on top of the 10 sections already filled with 30 students in each. Using the electricity grid, it could either attract 10 students from other surplus demand institutions or allow its 10 students to enroll in the online course at another participating institution.

When Michael Dolence and I wrote Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, deconstructing and reimagining the roles of content-expert faculty was one of our primary points of focus. Web 2.0 tools are making that promise a reality.