In this essay I argue that online education, artificial intelligence, and market pressures are driving higher education to adopt the industrial model and to find a new paradigm for delivering education at low costs. In addition, there is tremendous pressure from the federal government to make universities more accountable while making higher education less expensive and more accessible. I argue that in the future faculty members will not be engaged with students in the ways in which they have historically been engaged and that the structure and operations of higher education institutions will be very different. New, potential paradigms are beginning to emerge. p. 1

Higher education has not undergone the kind of disruptive transformation that we have seen across the world in manufacturing, communications, and other sectors. In this regard, p. 5

faculty members live a dual existence. They live in a 21st century society, one that is highly dependent on mechanization and automation, one in which everything is plentiful (at least in the first world), one in which labor costs are continually being reduced, and one in which workers are all too frequently being replaced by machines or cheaper workers in other countries. Yet faculty members continue to conduct their work as artisans. Each faculty member is an independent creator. Intellectual property is sacrosanct, nonreplicable, and highly ethereal. Once spent in a classroom, it has to be re-created by the artisan him or herself. p. 6

New and existent for-profit companies have also gotten into the free education marketplace, including Apple with its iTunes University (http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/); Peer-to-Peer University (http://p2pu.org/en/) leveraging social learning as a mechanism for informal, peer-led instruction; and Knext (http://www.knext.com/) helping people create prior learning portfolios to show mastery of subject matter in order to place out of traditional classes. p. 8

The e-revolution makes many institutions nervous. A number of traditional universities are behaving increasingly more nontraditionally; some nontraditional schools are growing fast; and college and university presidents all over the country are strategizing about how to use online education to expand their scope, reduce costs, and grow market share. The University of Southern New Hampshire, for example, has grown into the second largest online provider in New England with 7,000 online enrollments (Parry 2011). Looking to grow even more, the school is considering moving into the free or near-free education model. Southern New Hampshire University President Paul J. LeBlanc (2011) wrote in a white paper that a new model might be one in which students enroll in self-paced courses with no conventional instructors. p. 9

The courses are designed as a series of learning modules, each with very clear learning outcomes and built-in assessment along the way. The students can at any time join a group of peers working on the same course to pose questions, seek advice…through a social networking platform built for each course. At the end of the course, students take practice assessments and review their in-stream assessments to determine when they are ready to be assessed in the course. (pp. 1–2) The students then go to a proctored site to be tested, are assigned a grade, and awarded credit. The whole model hinges on excellent assessment. …We should no longer care if [students] raced through the course or took 18 months or if they worked on their courses with the support of a local church organization or community center or on their own. The game changing idea here is that when we have assessment right, we should not care about how a student achieves learning.” (LeBlanc 2011, p. 2) p. 9

Higher education has to and will change - industrial paradigm. Lot's of experimentation with models, already going on - future will see many models. Accreditation and link to student funding is an important piece. p. 13

References p. 13