I rarely talk to any researcher who doesn’t want to have an impact at the classroom level. Those same researchers express frustration at how the current system in academia restricts them from having that impact. But rare is a researcher who expresses the belief that they have the power to change the system, and it’s a cruel irony how intelligent scholars can spend a career discovering ways to improve educational systems other than the one they work in.

Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes.

On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflix streamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69.

The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first.

"The idea was to have a college of education that was part of the solution, as opposed to one that was only defining problems," Ms. Koerner said. "For a research level-one college, it's a different perspective."

In a digital age, we have less need for division, for we can rely on digital tools to provide us greater connection instead, allowing for increased knowledge of both subject areas and those working within them.  We no longer need the restrictions of "field."  In fact, we should be promoting just the opposite, a revolutionary approach to academia, one that dispenses with disciplinary boundaries rather than creating more of them.  None of us needs to be in a department any longer, not if we are willing to rely on our digital tools for keeping track of who is doing what, where, and when.  In terms of our scholarship, digital tools allow us to evaluate ourselves and each other, and to see how even people across the world view the work, in a matter of moments.

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We can "unfence" our academic fields today but, too often, we do not, but continue to follow patterns that, though they might have once been necessary, are no longer needed in this digital world.

Notre Dame’s engineering dean, Peter Kilpatrick, will be the first to concede that sophomore and junior years, which focus mainly on theory, remain a “weak link” in technical education. He says his engineering school has gradually improved its retention rate over the past decade by creating design projects for freshmen and breaking “a deadly lecture” for 400 students into groups of 80. Only 50 to 55 percent of the school’s students stayed through graduation 10 years ago. But that figure now tops 75 percent, he says, and efforts to create more labs in the middle years could help raise it further.

“We’re two years into that experiment and, quite honestly, it’s probably going to take 5 to 10 years before we’re really able to inflesh the whole curriculum with this project-based learning,” Dean Kilpatrick says.

No one doubts that students need a strong theoretical foundation. But what frustrates education experts is how long it has taken for most schools to make changes.

The National Science Board, a public advisory body, warned in the mid-1980s that students were losing sight of why they wanted to be scientists and engineers in the first place. Research confirmed in the 1990s that students learn more by grappling with open-ended problems, like creating a computer game or designing an alternative energy system, than listening to lectures. While the National Science Foundation went on to finance pilot courses that employed interactive projects, when the money dried up, so did most of the courses. Lecture classes are far cheaper to produce, and top professors are focused on bringing in research grants, not teaching undergraduates.

To people unaccustomed to academe, the scene on campus resembles bumper cars at an amusement park more than automobiles on an expressway. Leaders do not direct traffic as much as orchestrate the intentions of drivers. Strategic plans are always public and often contested.  Competitors routinely collaborate. Prestige, the academy’s analog to profits, stems from exclusion, not expansion—from the percentage of customers refused, not the number served. Welcome to Wonderland. 

With few exceptions, change happens differently in this realm. The business mindset conditions outsiders to expect powerful CEOs, comprehensive strategies, precise directives, systematic execution, and rapid response. Instead, artful leadership on campus unfolds tentatively, ambiguously, gradually, and somewhat obscurely. To the untrained eye, no one seems to be in charge. Yet, more often than not, the bees actually build the hive: the percentage of tenured faculty ebbs; the number of preprofessional programs rises; online courses appear; new disciplines emerge; scientists embrace entrepreneurship; schools burnish brands—all without presidential pronouncements.

HR in academia still operates primarilly with an industrial-age mindset: employees are resources to be managed, controled, manipulated, rather than individuals who should be inspired and led. That mindset favors rigid policies, and fears new approaches to work.

Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product. The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That's the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system, which is an international scandal.

It's about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact it's the basis for the famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind of healthcare system as other industrial countries, not only would there be no deficit, but there would be a surplus.

“What do we need to know for this test?” This may be the worst question of all. It reflects the fact that for many (students and teachers alike), education is a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create. I don’t think it is the student’s fault for asking this question. As teachers we have created and continue to maintain an education system that inevitably produces this question. If we accept Dewey’s notion that people learn what they do, the lecture format which is the mainstay of teaching (especially in large introductory courses) teaches students to sit in neat rows and to respect, believe, and defer to authority (the teacher). Tests often measure little more than how well they can recite what they have been told. Hoping to memorize only just as much as necessary to succeed on the test, they ask that question I never want to hear – the one exception to the rule that “there is no such thing as a bad question.” Frustrated with this question, and hoping to get my students to ask better questions, I decided to get to work creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that create lifelong learners rather than savvy test-takers.

in many classrooms on today's traditional campuses, with class sizes in the hundreds of students, distance learning begins in the fifth row

Most educators I talk with are unaware of the degree of change necessary today or of the degree to which deep change will continue over the coming decades. And so, the dominant emphasis on teaching remains.

There is no requirement that faculty in higher education understand learning theory. Even saying that, and knowing it is true, seems astonishing. How is it possible to make the turn from teaching to learning without knowing what that means? This is the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. Faculty members in higher education are researchers. The focus of their research has traditionally been on disciplinary knowledge and not on how humans learn.

The open digital environment already offers substantial advantages to scholars who are seeking greater reach and impact for their work. As the benefits of traditional publication decline because of some publishers' fearful attack on fair use, the benefits of open access will loom larger. Universities, too, are likely to discover that the status quo is unsustainable and move more quickly to adapt promotion-and-tenure processes to the new reality of direct online publication.

A major function of college is to signal to potential employers that one is qualified to work. The Internet is replacing this signaling function. Employers are recruiting on LinkedIn, Facebook, StackOverflow and Behance. People are hiring on Twitter, selling their skills on Google, and creating personal portfolios to showcase their talent. Because we can document our accomplishments, and have them socially validated with tools such as LinkedIn Recommendations, we can turn experiences into opportunity. As more and more people graduate from college, employers are unable to discriminate among job seekers based on a college degree and can instead hire employees based on their talents.

education reporters rarely, if ever, consult peer-reviewed journals.

 For example, my dissertation research examines educational research in print and online-only media outlets. Though I have so far sorted through nearly forty thousand articles in hundreds of publications, I have yet to come across a single mention of any of the six peer-reviewed education journals published by the American Educational Research Association, the world’s largest academic organization devoted to the study of education.

When a student turns in a paper, the professor sends it to RichFeedback, which then passes it along to its own tutors, mostly based in India. According to the Fresno Bee, the tutors return the papers "covered with color-coded corrections, suggestions for improvements and references to class text examples." Then professors only have to spend time evaluating a paper's subject-matter content.

So is it a big deal if the person correcting your paper is in India instead of on campus?

Of course the 'person in India' also could be 'essay grading software'...

That still leaves the problem of credit. Public libraries were the original OER [open educational resource], yet people can't demand a diploma just because they've learned from a book. But here, too, new developments are under way. The latest and most sophisticated open educational resources have tests embedded within them because assessment is a fundamental element of learning. Feedback-based, assessment-driven "cognitive tutors" developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon are woven into science, engineering, and philosophy courses produced by the university's Open Learning Initiative. For example, studies have shown that their online statistics course produces equal or better learning results than do traditional lectures. The same Carnegie Mellon experts will be helping the federal-grant recipients design their educational tools. Assessments create evidence. And that's all a credit is, in the end: credible evidence of learning.

As pace of change increases, the heritage-preserving aspect of literature reviews becomes a liability. Of necessity, a review is a backward-facing, historical-contextualizing activity. What happens when the very thing we are trying to change (i.e. the higher education system) serves as the foundation for enacting change? Obviously, we don’t get very far as the pull of the past and existing mindsets is instantiated in any attempt at a new vision.

The strategies spammers use to get past our attempts to tune them out display just the sort of ingenuity we need in dealing with these FOIA requests. The Mackinac Center's fishing expedition is like fake messages from PayPal trying to get our credit-card information. To combat it, we must adopt the strategies of a different Internet predator. Instead of fighting fire with fire, we must fight phishing with spam.

Many authors will cite papers or techniques without even being familiar with them or their authors, for fear of being labeled by peer reviewers as insufficiently familiar with the field

In a world where attention is the scarce resource, the enemy as Tim O’Reilly put it, is obscurity, not piracy.

Everyone is yelling and screaming about doing what we currently do better, not fundamentally changing what we do.

Why is anyone surprised to find that standards and expectations in our colleges are too low? High school graduates — a rapidly dwindling elite — come to college entirely unaccustomed to close reading, habits of disciplined analysis, skills in writing reasoned arguments and a basic grasp of the conduct, methods and purposes of science.

All many of them know is rote learning, and fear of mediocre standardized tests and grades. No vital connection between learning and life has been forged in our schools, much less any affection for voluntarily using one’s mind in the rigorous, sustained and frequently counterintuitive way that leads to innovation and the advancement of knowledge.

who will be the bearer of truth in the digital age — the professor or the processor?

America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.

“Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.”

The obvious objection to this last declaration is, “No, they aren’t; judgment is what education is supposed to produce; if students possessed it at the get-go, there would be nothing for courses and programs to do.”

our system of faculty creating their own lectures is a bit like having every instructor write his or her own textbook. If faculty wrote all of their own textbooks, most textbooks would be terrible. Why not just use the best lectures that have been posted on iTunesU, TED, etc. for content?

I tell faculty that their real value is not the information stored in their head. After all, nearly all of that information is publicly available in books or journals. A faculty member’s real value is in their interaction with students. The back and forth with students in discussion, or commentary on their assignments to improve their writing, for example, is what gives them value. Faculty should focus on this aspect of their teaching and automate as much as possible the simple content delivery part. Yet most faculty have it backwards—clinging to their lectures as their most important function.

Hat tip to John Nash: http://twitter.com/jnash/statuses/9772624779419648