Major innovations forged by the struggles of the Great Recession and fostered by technology are coming to higher education.
Investment dollars are flooding in with a record-smashing 168 venture capital deals in the U.S. alone last year, according to the springtime conference’s host, GSV Advisors. The computing power of “the cloud” and “big data” are unleashing new software. Public officials, desperate to cut costs and measure results, are open to change.
And everyone, it seems, is talking about MOOCs, the “Massive Open Online Courses” offered by elite universities and enrolling millions worldwide.
As with so many innovations from the lightbulb to the Internet, the technology is emerging mostly in the United States, fueled by American capital. But, as with those past innovations, the impact will be global. In this case, it may prove even more consequential in developing countries, where mass higher education is new and the changes could be built into emerging systems.
One source of this spring-like moment is the wintry depths of the financial crisis that struck five years ago, pushing higher education as never before to become more efficient. Another is simply the arrival of a generation demanding that higher education, at long last, embrace the technologies that have already transformed other sectors of the economy.
“The consumer, after five years on a tablet and five years on an iPhone, is just sick of being told, ‘you can’t do that,’” said Brandon Dobell, a partner at William Blair & Co., an investment bank and research firm based in Chicago. “I can do everything else on my phone, my tablet, why can’t I learn as well?”
