Los Angeles
Gathered for a national conference on college trusteeship here on Tuesday morning, board members from across the country said they are looking for cybersolutions to solve some of the most vexing problems their colleges face.
If there was a recurring theme at the three-day conference of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, it was that a major rethinking of instruction through broader use of online learning is the only real hope for reinventing the business of higher education.
Mark G. Yudof, who knows a thing or two about confronting diminished resources, suggested on Monday that it's a mistake to believe that small-scale changes in purchasing agreements or reduced course offerings will rescue the University of California system, where Mr. Yudof is president. Instead, colleges will need to aggressively alter the way they deliver courses, relying more heavily on online instruction, he said. It is a "myth" in higher education that "we can cut our way into survival," Mr. Yudof said.
Enter Carol A. Twigg, who offered an alternative here on Tuesday. As president and chief executive of the National Center for Academic Transformation, Ms. Twigg has argued for more than a decade that, when used effectively, technology can both improve student achievement and reduce costs.
"This is not rocket science," she said during a presentation.
The center has redesigned courses on more than 100 college campuses, and Ms. Twigg points toward a body of evidence suggesting that course sections can be scaled up to serve many more students without sacrificing quality. While the course redesigns differ from campus to campus, they often involve the use of low-stakes online quizzes to promote student mastery of material. Such quizzes and other online tasks can replace the need for class time and reduce the number of professors required to teach a course, Ms. Twigg said. On average, the course redesigns reduce costs by 37 percent, she said.
Ms. Twigg's work is often praised by online-learning advocates, but the model is hardly pervasive in higher education, and some are concerned about whether large classes undermine an educational experience. That said, Ms. Twigg tried to put to rest the notion that faculty resistance to course transformations is what's holding colleges back. Indeed, she not-too-subtly suggested that some of the people in her audience might be to blame for colleges being rather slow to embrace a technological revolution in the classroom.
"In our view, the problem is lack of leadership at all levels," she said.
Several of the center's course transformations have led to a doubling of class sizes, and some sections have more than 1,000 students. It's a model that not only has appeal to trustees who want to cut costs, but also to policy makers who are concerned about educational attainment in the United States.
Eduardo M. Ochoa, assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, said at a panel session on Monday that "less labor-intensive" instruction methods will be required to increase the nation's number of college graduates. He conceded that technology presents upfront costs for colleges. But, he said, "eventually, the way things are done becomes qualitatively different."
