Is the online education revolution finally coming?

A dozen years ago, many in the Australian tertiary education sector feared that students would be poached by online education providers based in the US.

As the Internet became part of our everyday lives, it threatened to disrupt the education sector, and to take away students and jobs. The federal government commissioned an expert team to investigate the matter, which reported back that the predicted online exodus to the US was unlikely.

A follow up investigation (they really were worried about this) after the tech wreck of 2000, found that while fears of a “tidal wave” were unfounded, competition for students would increase.

And so, everyone settled back down again, technology adoption slowly reached a late majority of the academic population, most of them using it to augment ‘traditional’ forms of conveying knowledge. At the same time, Australians reached the point of owning more than one mobile telephone per head of population.

Now the New York Times reports that traditional educators in the US are being overtaken by online enterprises:

As Wikipedia upended the encyclopedia industry and iTunes changed the music business, these businesses have the potential to change higher education

Why hasn’t this disruptive innovation hit earlier? After all, Australia has a strong history of distance education and a fine, century-old institution like UNE still teaches more than three quarters of students off-campus. Why didn’t this all move online and morph into new models long ago?

The diffusion of innovation relies on people as well as structures. From my own observation working for educational technology firms between the dot.com boom until five years ago – the Internet arrived too late in the careers of academics for many to see any point in changing. Perhaps not recognising the monumental shift about to change everything, or maybe they didn’t want to go out of their comfort zones with retirement so close, the result is an education sector that’s in many ways stuck in the past. That’s not going to be good enough for younger Australians, or their employers for that matter.

What stopped the innovators outside the entrenched system was that the technology was clunky, and broadband expensive and patchy. The price and accessibility of technology slowed adoption by users before it could reach scale. Now the explosion in use of tablets and smart phones is occurring at a time when Australian students will be given more power to drive demand as the federal government seeks to lift the percentage of young adults with a degree from the current rate of 29 per cent to 40 per cent within ten years. Established universities that eschew online education in favour of the on-campus experience are already missing out on the growth that their peers are getting in their online courses. 

What this means is that for institutions to thrive in the emerging new environment, their academic leaders as well as teaching and professional staff will have to be savvy to the opportunities of new technologies and media forms. And this time, they will need to really get their hands dirty, as it were, and use the tools to transform old ways of doing things, in order to remain relevant.