The Future of Higher Education

Hot off the presses! NMC, along with The Economist and Apple Computer, Inc. just released a white paper on the ways in which technology is shaping the future of higher education. The paper reports on the findings of a survey of almost 300 executives - CIOs and tech leaders both inside and outside education. Twelve interviews were conducted with individuals from this group as well. The results suggest that technology will profoundly change higher education over the next five years. Here are some specifics from the survey data:

• 60% of all respondents expect that professors will teach in more than one medium by 2013
• 60% say that online learning will be a fundamental component of the education experience
• 64% of respondents expect that universities will frequently partner with corporations and other third parties to create new areas of study over the next five years
  

As was the case with the students who participated in the 2008 ECAR study, the respondents of the NMC survey reported that social networking sites (SNSs) were popular tools among those in campus administration. Career services and alumni groups are examples of units that favor the use of SNSs.

Also becoming more popular in higher education throughout the world is online learning. Many of the institutions are making connections with other countries through the formation of foreign location sites. Overall, many of the higher education respondents said that technology has positively impacted their institutions.

While this NMC report is suggesting that we will see more technology in our classrooms over the next five years, the ECAR students stated that they wanted only moderate amounts of technology. In fact, they claimed that face-to-face interactions with their instructors was very important to them. So, who is driving this push toward more technology? Because this report was produced, at least in part, by those with corporate interests (The Economists, Apple Computer, and tech leaders inside/outside academia), one could posit that they have a vested interest in promoting the use of technology and encouraging more partnerships corporations and higher education institutions.

If we as educators blindly accept technology without assessing the actual learning benefits associated with the technology, are we really serving our "tech-savvy" customers? Based on the ECAR study, these customers may say "no." It appears that today's students make a clear distinction between use of technology for personal and academic reasons. While they are enthusiastic technology users in their personal life, they are less enthusiastic about these tools for learning purposes. Perhaps the tech leaders are viewing higher education their their own adult, corporate lens rather than really finding out what the users want.

Gender Gap in College

In a new book by Linda J. Sax, a professor of education at UCLA, she examines the differences between the male and female college experience. Sax stresses that even though the majority of college students are female (more than 60% female at many institutions), the numbers don't tell the whole story and hide some key concerns.

For this study, Sax collected data from 17,000 male and female students from 200 institutions. One difference her analysis revealed was that females enter college with a lack of confidence. In contrast, their male counterparts have much more confidence at this stage. In other words, even if the females are doing better academically than the males, they do not believe they are doing so. Perhaps even more troubling is that the confidence levels of female college students decline during the college years. However, female students who have positive interactions with the faculty gain self-confidence over time.

Another interesting finding is related to the gender makeup of the students and the faculty as well as the peer groups for students. Students (males and females) do better academically at institutions with a high proportion of female students and faculty. Further, males perform better academically at institutions that have peer support groups that support "traditional gender roles."

There are many other findings outlined in Sax's book. In fact, she found 584 “college effects” that differ between male and female students. While the number of females may equal or exceed the number of males on college campuses around the nation, their experiences may be quite different.

The Tipping Point?

According to a report by The American Council on Education, the U.S. may have reached the "tipping point" in terms of educational advancement of young people. For the first time, this generation is not better educated than the previous one. They speculate that this may be due to differences in educational attainment among different racial and ethnic groups. One group of note are Hispanic youth who appear to have acquired less education than their parents and grandparents, for example. These findings are concerning given that a two-year degree is a requirement for many jobs.

Not only is there no increase in general, but some fields have seen a decline. One example is computer science. The number of both Whites and minority groups has dropped in this field. Engineering, especially at the doctoral levels, has also seen fewer students gracing their programs. Other portions of the report examine college persistence (declined slightly), degrees conferred (minority women outpaced minority men at all degree levels), and employment in higher education (minorities have made gains but are still trailing Whites).

In addition to the ACE website, The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief summary of this report.

One question: What happened to our tech-savvy students are are learning anytime, anywhere 24/7/365?

Ebooks

Springer (yes, the STM book/journal publisher) has just released the findings of a new study on ebooks. The white paper, which is a follow up to the Springer 2007 survey on ebook adoption rates and benefits, outlines the end-user perspective on ebooks (e.g., how familiar they are with ebooks, as well as the frequency with which they access these resources). While the 2007 survey included six institutions, only five institutions participated in the 2008 round. It appears that the University of Florida and Victoria University (Australia) were involved in 2007 but not 2008. A new addition in 2008 was JRD Tata Memorial Library Bangalore, India.

The results from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were highlighted by the authors. At this institution, research and study were the top reasons students use ebooks. Leisure was trailing behind 68 percentage points. Reference works were also mentioned by respondents at the other institutions. Conference proceedings and textbooks received high marks as well.

While the respondents were familiar and used ebooks, they also pointed out advantages and disadvantages with these types of resources. The primary advantage of ebooks was full text searching. Convenience and easy assess were two others. However, reading from a screen prevented some from not using ebooks more frequently. Users are comfortable with print books and have a long history with that format. In the future, the respondents believe that they will access ebooks for certain types of reading such as looking up research/references materials but will continue to prefer print books for other types of reading.

In the end, the authors of this white paper conclude that "While eBooks will not replace print books in the near future, users are rapidly adopting them as complementary to print books" (p. 8).

Back to virtual school

The September-October 2008 issue of EDUCAUSE is devoted to education in virtual worlds, particularly Second Life. For those well-versed in the virtual world literature, most of the contributions (i.e., utopian love-fest) will not be new. If you want to see what's being discussed by educators today, this issue is a quick read. The most "balanced" contribution in the collection is the last one. So, if you're pressed for time, focus your attention on Chris Johnson's "Drawing a Roadmap: Barriers and Challenges to Designing the Ideal Virtual World for Higher Education."

Enjoy!