Christensen and his co-author, Henry J. Eyring, take a different tack in this book.  Approximately 60-75 percent of the book provides a narrative of two institutions of higher education, Harvard University and Ricks College, now BYU-Idaho.  While many observers of higher education may not consider Harvard an innovator, decisions made by its presidents over its several hundred year history have influenced the direction of American higher education.  Whether it’s the four-year baccalaureate degree, the creation of various majors, the design of a baccalaureate degree to include general education courses, professional schools with a requirement that applicants complete a bachelor’s degree before matriculating, faculty tenure, the “publish or perish” culture for faculty, or athletic programs; most of those foundational principles that we take for granted today had an evolutionary turn at Harvard.  Christensen and Eyring make the case that the problem with higher ed today is that most four year colleges and universities aspire to “be like Harvard” but only five percent have a realistic chance of pulling it off.

The disrupter to the sector according to Christensen and Eyring is online education.  Whether it’s a for-profit university (DeVry University is one of those cited in the article) or a non-profit (Western Governors University is cited), the authors maintain that the cost of operating online universities is half of the cost of operating a traditional university for many reasons (no athletic teams, no dormitories, no cafeterias, expensive student services, use of adjunct faculty, etc.).  The lack of a need for physical classrooms provides online universities with the ability to offer classes year round.  Also, the recent focus of accrediting bodies on learning outcomes has caused the online programs to take advantage of technology and measure outcomes more effectively in many cases than traditional programs whose accreditation was achieved decades ago.

The story of Ricks College in Idaho has a Harvard connection through the Eyring family and others.  Ricks’ beginnings as a two year college and evolution to a four-year, teaching university is a fascinating story.  Along the way, Ricks’ direction was heavily influenced by its affiliation with and sponsorship by the Mormon Cchurch.  The authors note the elimination of intercollegiate athletics, upward move to a four-year institution, implementation of internship programs, implementation of blended learning programs by utilizing remote sites operated by the Mormon Church for periodic face-to-face classes, and the pricing of the university’s online programs on the margin in order to compete with the online programs run by for-profit universities.  According to the authors, BYU-Idaho is competitive because its leaders didn’t wait to be overrun by the disruptive online programs.

Christensen and Eyring make a great case for online learning as a disruption and provide a few relevant examples of the remaking of BYU-Idaho into a thriving institution in an era when many colleges and universities are taking steps backward rather than forward.  However, their book does not provide detailed analyses of best practices in online education that are continually refined by online educators on a monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly basis.  By the time a traditional institution wakes up to the need for online courses and programs, it may find itself far behind the learning curve and even further behind in its ability to implement the cultural changes required to compete in a world influenced by the pace of technology.

The term she referenced originated with Marc Parensky, founder of Games2train and considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the relationship between games and gaming technology and the learning experiences of today’s young people.  Parensky holds Masters degrees from Yale, Middlebury and the Harvard School of Business and has been an advocate for the use of technology in classrooms for years.  Parensky has even worked with the Department of Defense to establish an educational program that embraces the use of games as positive educational tools.

The lesson I learned from observing my daughters at play was that children who have access to technology are able to utilize it and to think, act, and learn in ways that are vastly different than the way we learned years ago.

Today’s issue of Inside Higher Ed features an interview with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, which focuses significantly on data collected at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where both work.  The two explore the digital context in which today’s young people are learning and analyze the impact of their digital environment on their learning experiences.

Digital Natives seem to have an advantage in today’s world (and, according to the Berkman Center, not all youths are digital natives; it is a label that depends on the individual’s access to and frequency of use of digital technologies).  Technologies are expanding and shrinking our world simultaneously, opening doors to means of communication and commerce that 100 years ago were not conceivable.   At the same time, technology brings far off international neighbors directly into our homes via emails and webcams.  Today’s students have access to a wealth of information (including a growing number of primary documents which, as technologies improve, have been provided as images on many websites, including the Library of Congress) that their parents did not.  Even with such remarkable educational opportunities available via the Internet and other technologies, there are problems associated with the use of such technologies which require serious consideration.

Advocates of the use of the Internet and other technologies in classrooms, Palfrey and Urs state that given the omnipresence of digital technology in a student’s world, teachers must become fluent in the issues associated with copyrights and discerning between legitimate Internet sources and those that lack academic legitimacy.  The authors note that many of the young people with whom they spoke did not know that Wikipedia entries can be edited by anyone with an Internet connection.  Only a minority of the students, according to Palfrey and Urs, realized the problems that the Wikipedia system posed to the site’s credibility.  They also discuss the academic challenges associated with a rising “cut-and-paste” culture among digital natives and conclude that parents and educators must proactively inform digital natives about the ethical and unethical use of other people’s work. 

While there are obvious dangers in the prevalence of digital technology in the classroom, the benefits, I believe, are worth the risk, a risk which can largely be avoided by a systemized curriculum which integrates the use of technology with frequent lessons on the responsibilities associated with using it.  Of course, not every course lends itself to the use of technology and academia must remain mindful of this as they define the balance between appropriate uses of technology and inappropriate uses of technology in the classroom.  As an online university, APUS is obviously a strong advocate of the use of technology in the classroom.  In fact, it is online technology that forms the cornerstone of our classrooms!  We have the distinct advantage of being able to use the Internet to provide quality educational opportunities to our students while using our Discussion Boards as a means of providing the typical Socratic method of dialogue between students and teachers, a mix that allows students to benefit from both.

When I cast an eye on the broader K-20 educational platform, it is imperative that we provide our students with not only the access to the technology but also access to teachers who have been trained in the appropriate pedagogies to provide learning experiences that inform and enrich the student and prepare them for the challenges of an ever shrinking or “flattening” world.