essay on The changing nature of online education
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The newspaper and book businesses have been transformed in recent years. But not education. After a 30-year school reform movement, no major urban school district in the country has been successfully turned around. Meanwhile, despite loud and persistent criticism from government, media and families, the cost of college continues to rise faster than inflation and student loan debt is ballooning. So why hasn't education changed?
This nation is making a transition from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. All of our social institutions — not just education but also government, media, health care and finance — were created for the former. The result is that they work less well than they once did. They seem to be broken and need to be redesigned for a new era.
The redesign is happening in two ways: through repair, attempting to fix the existing institutions; and through replacement, creating new institutions to take the places of the old ones.
Repair has been the primary mode of change in the nonprofit sector — heavily regulated, provider-driven institutions like schools and colleges, where the institution determines what the consumer receives, what students must study in order to earn a diploma. In contrast, replacement is more likely to occur in for-profit and consumer driven institutions, in which the user chooses what products to consume and there is money to be made by entrepreneurs who successfully develop alternatives. The news media and bookstores are excellent examples — businesses in which the user determines what to read, hear and watch.
In media, repair efforts by the major newspapers and magazines were generally too little and too late. The rapid emergence of the internet and cable news spawned an array of popular alternatives or replacements — such as Yahoo!, CNN, and The Huffington Post, as well as many others that failed. Between 1990 and 2012, daily newspaper circulation dropped by more than 30 percent. Perhaps most telling: In 2011 The Huffington Post sold for $315 million. Two years later, The Washington Post was purchased for $250 million and The Boston Globe was acquired for $70 million. Adjusting for inflation, the sale price of the two traditional newspapers, combined, was still less than that of The Huffington Post.
In the book business, the independent neighborhood bookstore was largely replaced by megastores like Barnes and Noble and Borders. They were in turn replaced by the online bookstore Amazon.com, which offered major discounts on books and developed a new book format, the e-reader. Today Borders is out of business, Barnes and Noble is reeling, and Amazon has expanded its business to become a major retailer in many fields.
The measure of success in these two industries — news media and bookstores — has been profitability or potential profitability. However, the replacements also share several common characteristics. In comparison with the existing organizations, they are faster, cheaper and more easily accessible. They "have on their shelves" a much larger selection of content and titles, even highly specialized. Because they are digital, they are available any time, any place. They are more consumer-driven than their forebears, allowing users to customize content and, in many cases, to access it without any mediation from the provider. These are the features consumers chose over the existing models. They point to the qualities consumers are coming to expect and demand in all the institutions they deal with.