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!
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