The end of the world for pay-to-play education?

EdX is a joint partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone. The impacts of this movement toward "free online courses for all" can be examined in terms of its focus, delivery, and price.

First, the focus of edX is on "coursework" which has been the central activity of traditional schoolwork on university campuses for ages. So, if the current content-based, lecture-focused schoolwork remains unchanged and edX digitizes all courseware, it will for sure have a major impact on students's on-campus learning experiences. However, some schools may still argue that online education only offers an alternative means to access the unique learning experiences (i.e., the end) that are only available from their campuses. Hence it is inconsistent for them to sweat the MIT/Harvard step now when they were unconcerned about the University of Phoenix then. Unfortunately, such an means-end argument based on uniqueness of the end of campus schoolwork (e.g., arguments such as "my lectures are better than yours")  may not hold true anymore due to the reasons explained below.

Next, the delivery of these digitized courses is online through the Internet, which has traditionally been regarded as an ineffective means to offer rich learning experiences. However, the reasons against online course delivery in the past may not hold true anymore in the future due to rapid advancements of eLearning technologies in recent years. For example, the technological platform of edX will include video lessons, embedded testing, real-time feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, collaborative web-based laboratories, and student paced learning. Walk around any university campuses today, you will immediately realize that these online activities promised by EdX are already much more than what our students actually do when they take traditional lectures in classrooms. Since edX intends to provide open-source software to any interested institutions to join edX with their own educational content, the uniqueness of any campus-specific and local-instructor-only coursewark will soon disappear completely. 

Last, the price of these digitized online courseware from anyone is free of charge to everyone. This is indeed a major blow to all players who have been operating with the pay-to-play business model of education over centuries. Trying to be cheaper than the cheap is possible and doable only to an extent. But how can you complete with the free? You cannot be cheaper than the free! How can universities keep charging top dollars for a 4-year degree if courses they offer are available online to anyone at no cost? Will then we all be diminished or distinguished? No! - some may argue that this end-of-the-world scenario will only happen if the market demand is completely elastic. While admitting that demand for course contents is elastic, they suggest that all of the evidence thus far shows that demand for credentials from research universities is relatively inelastic (hence no worry for those guys!). Not only is such argument of detaching contents from credentials self-contradicting (to their above argument that "my lectures are better than yours"), but also the real difference between the two is disappearing rapidly as the uneven quality of course contents being equalized by the online courseware available to all everywhere.  

In short, the edX focus is coursework, delivery is online, and price is free. Then, is it shaking the world and breaking a new ground? It might have been true that the past online courses provided an alternative means to access, rather than a new model to replace, the traditional schoolwork (i.e., classroom lectures). In fact, even the developer of edX admits that "...though this (i.e., edX) will never replace the traditional residential model of undergraduate education, it will serve to improve and supplement the teaching and learning experienced...".  But it is important to realize that the advancement of delivery technology and the zero price of digitized contents that are happening now have already pushed online education pass the strategic inflection point (SIP) where nothing short of fundamental changes will do. Indeed, the ground of traditional universities is now shaking valiantly because the schoolwork on these campuses remains to be content-based lectures in the classroom. 

We are no longer competing on the same old S-curve which governs the pay-to-play education model over the past century. A brand new S-curve that uses a much superior set of technologies and takes out price consideration completely has been created by edX which represents a discontinuous innovation in high education this time around! Although this new S-curve is still one the same plane as the old one (i.e., it offers the same kind of products for the same population of customers), in due time, it will completely subsume and replace those classroom lectures as we know of them today. As digitized courses by the best faculty in the field are available online for free, any universities which continue to focus on the traditional lecture-based schoolwork in classrooms will soon see the end of their world.

The "free" movement of online education

Like any product on a competitive market, the development of online courses follows a S-curve. Initially, development/delivery costs were high and performance/acceptance was low. After "crossing the chasm", the performance/price ratio of online courses raised very rapidly due to competitions, and more players jumped into the market. Further competitions among more players lead to rapid commoditization where the only thing that seems to matter to customers is the price. This is the current situation where intense price competitions have moved online courses from an expensive novelty to a cheap commodity, and the market of traditional distance education has already reached the tail end of the S-curve.

Rather than keep offering even "cheaper" alternatives to compete with the already "cheap" products on the tail end of the same S-curve (which will only drive everyone "over the cliff" sooner - an act of collective destruction), a new strategy that can create a new S-curve for the online education market must be found.

So, rather than being "cheaper", how do you compete with "cheap" on the market?

Well, it turns out that the best winning strategy is the so-called "free" strategy - that you offer the same product "for free" to the same market. This for sure will kill all players who are still fighting on the price war. That happened many times in different technology markets, such as Internet Explorer by Microsoft, and is exactly what is happening with the online courses market today. A new S-curve of online education, which completely takes the price consideration away, is now born.

This "free" movement of online education started a few years ago when the MIT Open Course Ware (OCW) initiative (see http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) was first created. Digitized course contents including lecture notes, exams, and videos from leading faculty at MIT are made available online to all, free of charge and no registration required (by the way, no degree offered either, which is a point that we will discuss further later). Since product price doesn't matter anymore on this new S-curve, players can focus on competing with each others on product performance, and hence the market share.

In order to "cross the chasm" again on this new S-curve, MIT teamed together with Harvard, the two best brands in global higher education, to create the new edX partnership (see http://www.edxonline.org/) which is a joint venture builds on MITx and Harvard's existing distance learning programs with the aim to "benefit campus-based education and beyond". Many were shocked by this alliance between two traditional rivals across the Charles River, believing that the ground of online learning has started to shake and a new ground for higher education has been broken. The fact is that the ground was broken already a few years back when MIT created the OCW which started a new S-curve of online education. The current edX partnership between MIT and Harvard is just an attempt to cross the chasm of this new S-curve.

Now that the chasm has been crossed, what's next?

According to the rules of market competitions, when the chasm is crossed, the focus of the debates on the market will shift from "is this for real" to "how can I be part of it". Players will no longer wonder if online courses can/should be made free for all, but rather they will rush into this new market with the typical "me-too" strategy. For sure, more universities will begin to offer free online courses and more multi-university consortia will be formed to expand their market shares. This is a very good thing for the customer, because more high quality courses will become available (and affordable for sure).

But for the players in the field, i.e., universities that create and offer these courseware, has the ground of online education really been shaken? Surprisingly, the answer is "no"!

The old S-curve of these traditional "pay-to-play" online courses is now been (or soon will be) completely subsumed by the new S-curve of free online courses exemplified by the edX partnership. But it is important to note that, at least for now, this free-courseware movement has not altered the paradigm of education and learning in any fundamental way. This free movement is for sure a major and significant evolution on the means/methods of delivery course contents to learners; but it is not yet a true revolution on the end/goals of education which must focus on delivering a fresh and richer new learning experience to students on university campuses. It makes much more superior product offers to satisfy the current customer needs (e.g., taking courses from good teachers) on the same market. The free movement has indeed created a new S-curve (hence a new ground is shaking); but it is on the same "plane" as that of the old S-curve of "pay-to-play" online education (hence the ground was not alternated fundamentally, and no new ground was broken).

So, what should/can players with a revolutionary mind do? How do you compete with something that is already "free" to all? Next, we will explain that traditional universities cannot continue doing business as usual by pretending that nothing has happened, because the strategic inflection point of higher education has been passed this time around. We will then present a strategy that can competes with, and perhaps more importantly, complements, the "free" by creating a new S-curve which lies on a different plane than those old pay-to-play and new free-for-all models of online education.

The ground is shaking, and you may wonder why!

The current eLearning paradigm, exemplified by various distance education programs that offer online courses, attempts to provide a different means to reach the same end of education, which ultimately is students' learning experience on campus. It has succeeded in a very small part, and its fate is now in serious question.

When students taking a course to learn a subject, their learning experiences include at least two parts: listening lectures from a teacher first and then working with classmates on exercises. Before distance education, both were done on campus, the former inside the classroom, called the schoolwork, and the later outside the classroom, called the homework. Online courses have achieved a partial success because it provides an alternative means by which the schoolwork is delivered. Despite nothing else in the learning experience has changed, distanced education has become very popular in recent years among universities because it lowers delivery costs and for students because it offers great flexibility.

So, why is the fate of this seemly-successful eLearning paradigm in question? There are at least two reasons: first, the means of learning has been largely commoditized, and, second, the end of education has been greatly devalued.

Commoditization of the means of learning

Commoditization is the process by which a product on a competitive market reaches a point in its development where one brand has no features that differentiate it from other brands, and consumers buy on price alone. This happens at the tail end of a S-curve. Existing online courses focus on digitizing the delivery of course contents, using taped lecture videos, canned subject modules, and structured discussion boards (mostly between the teacher and students). Digitization of courseware calls for standardization of contents, which triggers competition in price, and, in turns, leads to commoditization on market. There should be no surprise of these developments of this online-course paradigm, because they follow exactly "the golden rules of automation" for any products and brands on a competitive market.

From "expensive" to "cheap"

Digitized courses offered online present a big threat to traditional lectures which are becoming increasing expensive. When the only thing that matters is price, supplies become increasingly saturated and revenues begins to rapidly decline; market players know why but start to wonder what's next. For-profit universities, that have traditionally specialized on distance education, have no option but to stay price-competitive on the market by offering more for less, which further speeds up the commoditization process for everyone. The so-called "research universities", many of which got into the distance education market at the first place largely in response to the threats from for-profit universities, have, however, a much tougher dilemma to deal with. These institutions, which have always prided themselves for the high quality of their education (and research), cannot keep bragging about their core value anymore because quality matters much less than price on a commodity market. At the same time, it is understandable that these institutions hesitate to play the price competition game because not only they will for sure lose to those for-profit players, but also it will quickly deprive their traditional value proposition.

From "cheap" to "free"

Tomorrow, we will explain the current movement of "free" online courses, such as MIT and Harvard's EdX project, as a smart strategy for research universities to fight off the price competitions from for-profit organization on the commoditized eLearning market. We will also explain why this "free-for-all" movement is not the ultimate solution for the current dilemma,

How to compete with "free"?

Then, we move to elucidate why the current eLarning paradigm greatly devalues the end of education,  before presenting a new value proposition for campus learning experience that can open a new frontier for technology-enhanced education in the future. Stay tuned!

iPodia Alliance: "classrooms-without-borders"

All dreams need doing! Doing iPodia by an institutionally and geographically bounded traditional university is very hard. But, together, a group of brave innovators can change the landscape of the century-old ivory-tower model of higher education. This is why we created iPodia Alliance.

What is iPodia Alliance?

iPodia Alliance is an independent, not-for-profit, international consortium among leading higher education institutions in major world cultural regions for the purpose of developing, promoting, implementing, and dissimilating the iPodia-style of education paradigm and learning opportunities to create a borderless world-classroom for all. Our end is iPodia, and iPodia Alliance is a means to achieve this end.

What is the current membership of iPodia Alliance?

iPodia Alliance currently includes six chartered members:

• University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A, 
• Peking University in Beijing, China, 
• National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, 
• Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, 
• KAIST - Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, and 
• RWTH University of Aachen in Aachen, Germany. 

The Viterbi iPodia Office at University of Southern California serves as the Administrator to provide required administrative supports to all Alliance members free of charge. iPodia Alliance is now expanding its memberships to include a few more leading universities from other world cultural areas, such as IIT-Mumbai - India Institute of Technology in India, Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Africa.

What are the membership selection criteria of iPodia Alliance?

As an organization which focuses on promoting intercultural active learning globally, iPodia Alliance selects its members based on criteria different from other existing university ranking schemes. First, we mainly target at higher learning institutions in geographical regions that represent major world cultures which complement one another. Second, the university must have established undergraduate and graduate programs whose quality are compatible to that of existing Alliance members. Third, a university can also be considered for membership if it brings strategic values that are deemed important to the Alliance by the iPodia Executive Board.

What are the operational principals of iPodia Alliance?

There are three principals that govern the operations of iPodia Alliance. Firstly, the "equal-reciprocity" principal encourages members to strive for a balance between the iPodia courses offered to and received from the Alliance within a certain period. This ensures equal contributions and mutual benefits among all members. Secondly, the "revenue-neutral" principal suggests that members are responsible for the costs of their participation in all activities and no money (e.g., tuitions, etc.) will exchange hands between any Alliance members. This promotes the not-for-profit culture for the Alliance members to focus on win-win collaborations. Lastly, the "no-joint-degree" principal declares that the Alliance's main goal is to share courseware development and delivery rather than create joint degrees among its member universities. This enables all Alliance members to maintain the independence and uniqueness of their curricula.

The global learning network established through iPodia Alliance represents a virtual "world-classroom" or "classrooms-without-boarders," in which all collaborating institutions retain their independent identities and unique curricula, but work together strategically in course development and classroom delivery in areas of mutual interest and global importance in the 21st century.

For more information, please visit the iPodia official website.

iPodia + EdX = global active learning

What is active learning?

Learning is naturally an active process when students are motivated to grasp both content and context of the concepts being taught. Standard lectures is largely passive, in which teachers do most of the talking to students who receive the contents in the classroom (i.e., traditional schoolwork) and then exercise the contexts outside the classroom (i.e., traditional homework) by themselves. In contrast, active learning is learner-centered; it calls for more participative engagements with teachers and collaborative interactions among students. Many believe that "flipping the current campus experience", by doing the schoolwork at home and the homework at school, is a viable way to realize active learning, whose effectiveness has been well proven by education researchers.

What is the role of iPodia in global active learning?

Globalization has opened many new possibilities for active learning. As more and more lectures are available online nowadays, doing the schoolwork globally (e.g., watching lectures by world-renowned teachers) at home has become a reality. However, doing the homework globally (e.g., collaborating with international cohorts on exercises) at school is still ineffective due to large physical and institutional gaps among universities. This is where iPodia comes in to create an integrated borderless learning environment where all students can engage in active learning by interacting with classmates and faculty located anywhere in the world without ever leaving their own campuses. iPodia complements online lectures to achieve global active learning by allowing students to watch online lectures at home before coming to the classroom to interact with their peers locally and far away.

What is the difference between iPodia and EdX?

EdX is a joint partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning opportunities to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online to all for free. Through this partnership, the two institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone. While EdX makes "doing the schoolwork globally at home" possible for learners, iPodia provides students the opportunities of "doing the homework globally at school" with classmates across the globe. They complements each other pedagogically, and both are needed for global active learning in the future.

What are the unique characteristics of iPodia pedagogy?

iPodia is a form of "blended-eLearning", where technologies empower the learners rather than replace the teacher. The characteristics of iPodia pedagogy are learner-centered, no-distance, and cross-cultural. iPodia is learner-centered as oppose to teacher-based, because it provides an innovative approach to realize active learning without institutional borders. iPodia is no-distance learning rather than distance education, because it uses the Internet to eliminate the interaction distance among participating learners. iPodia is cross-cultural in addition to cross-discipline, because it exploits cultural diversities among international learners as a source for global innovation.

iPodia complements EdX to make active learning in a global scale possible!

For more information, please visit the iPodia official website.

Let the iPodia journey begins today.....

This blog is about iPodia, and the thinking behind this new movement of global higher education. It is hosted by Stephen Lu, the creator of iPodia.

What is iPodia?

iPodia is a new pedagogy which promotes peer-to-peer interactive learning among faculty and students across disciplinary, institutional, physical and cultural boundaries. The "i" in iPodia stands for "innovative", "interactive", "international", and any combinations of the above.

What is iPodia vision?

iPodia vision is "learning together for a better world". This vision is based on the three fundamental beliefs that

• what you learn depends on with whom you learn, 
• cultural diversity can stimulate global innovation, and 
• togetherness is a new frontier of the 21st century global education. 

What is iPodia mission? 

iPodia mission is to use the Internet to support active learning approaches, such as interactive discussion, collaborative teamwork, learning-by-teaching, etc., among local and remote learners to create a true "classrooms-without-borders" paradigm around the world.

What are iPodia goals?

iPodia has its partnership, pedagogical and platform goals.

• The partnership goal is to involve leading universities from major world cultures to share education resources strategically to change the landscape of 21st century higher education. 
• The pedagogical goal is to collaboratively develop and deliver courseware of global importance to enable borderless interactions for active and experimential learning. 
• The platform goal is to establish common technical and infrastructural standards upon which eLearning resources can be networked across campuses to form an interactive learning environment for all. 

This is the beginning of an exciting journey that will shape the landscape of global higher education forever!

For more information, please visit the iPodia official website.