Five ways small colleges can respond to MOOCs

The chorus of people proclaiming that MOOCs will destroy traditional higher education is long and getting louder.  MSN Money wonders if they portend "The End of Higher Education as We Know It." The excellent education analyst Kevin Carey suggests that they present both a solution to access and cost challenges of higher education.  And venture capitalists, world-renowned universities, and star faculty members are lending their wealth, fame, and wisdom to the creation of businesses that create, market, and manage MOOCs.

If MOOCs achieve their wildest dreams--huge enrollments of students taking courses for free that grant college credit, then  institutions that charge large tuitions will be hurt.  But MOOCs are far from those dreams.  While a few courses have massive enrollments, a tiny proportion of students complete them.  The quality of the course content is uncertain, and the pedagogical assumptions behind them are flawed, at least if what we think we know about the power of active learning is true. MOOCs offer individual courses, not well thought-through curricula that lead to higher-level learning outcomes. And MOOCs don't have a business model that works for the simple reason that free things don't earn the money required to create them.  In this, MOOCs are not unlike shareware and social networks--both things that consumers can use for free but which seek to earn income.

It is here--at the intersection of MOOCs' prominence and their weakness, that small colleges who wish to engage with MOOCs (as opposed to ignoring them or demeaning their popularity) can act.  So the question is how small colleges can respond to MOOCs in a way that takes advantage of their prominence and the expertise of small colleges.  Here are a few thoughts:

• Provide academic support to students who enroll in MOOCs. Any traditional institution that lost more than 90 percent of the students in a class before it ended would shut down.  And so small colleges have figured out how to ensure that students stay enrolled, not just for a single course but through to graduation.  They do so by providing academic support--discussions, tutoring, advising, and evaluation to track student learning.  MOOC students who are serious about learning would be anxious to have this sort of support.
• Provide feedback, evaluation, and improvements for MOOCs. One of the dangers of using famous faculty to teach MOOCs is that famous faculty get their fame from excellence in research, not (usually) in provoking student learning.  MOOC providers (and other edtech entrepreneurs) have not tended to study student learning or to design their work based on measurable outcomes. In other words, online providers of education haven't given attention to quality control.  Colleges and universities have spent the better part of the past twenty years building courses to achieve certain educational outcomes.  That expertise is sorely needed in the world of MOOCs.
• Use MOOCs to fill gaps in their own curricula. Students at small colleges experience curricular gaps in three ways: the school does not offer a particular course because it lack faculty expertise in that area, courses are offered rarely so students who need to take a course can't get it, or students develop curiosity in an area where there is no course.  MOOCs could fill those gaps more easily and less expensively than hiring an adjunct, assigning overload to a faculty member, or hiring a new faculty line.  So if a student wants a course in, say, East African history, let her take a MOOC. more broadly, MOOCs could be a way to round out the curriculum for intensely focused schools.  If you run a music conservatory, for example, use MOOCs to fill out general education.
• Use MOOCs for remediation. A large proportion of college students need remediation which institutions supply by offering lots of sections of college algebra, for example.  The quality of these courses vary among instructors (often adjuncts), and the cost to the institution (faculty lines, classroom space, etc.) and to students (uncertain quality, the need to repeat, slowing the path to graduation) make remediation a big issue.  But if an institution selected a MOOC in, say, remedial English (or built a curriculum in math through the Khan Academy's YouTube lessons) consistency of content would improve, students could progress at their own speed, and the cost to the institution would go down. 
• Use MOOCs to assure the quality of prior knowledge. Colleges already accept massive amounts of transfer credit.  The quality of some of it is very good.  But other sources--concurrent enrollment, for example--provide prior learning of uncertain quality.  Add to this fact that ever more students will come to traditional colleges with credit from for-profit universities, corporate training, and military service.  Many schools deny students credit for that experience.  but a school which wanted to welcome students who had learned in those settings might ask prospective students to work through a MOOC for free, and use their success in the MOOC as a  rationale for granting credit for prior learning.  MOOCs thus become a real tool for access to higher education, not a tool for avoiding the wisdom built into enrolling full-time in a college.

The most important fact about the future of higher education

Many things will be true about higher education; only some of those things will be important. If your school is concerned about the future of higher education, it must both figure out what makes a fact important (in my book important facts are those that, if acted upon, have the potential to change the whole institution), and which important facts your school wants to focus on.

The most important fact about the future of higher education is this: all students will be transfer students.  By this I mean two things: first, that an increasing proportion of students will approach an institution bringing transcripted credits with them, and second, that even more students will bring expertise with them that they have learned outside traditional institutions, but which must be transferred into their new campus if that campus is to be true to the student's learning and aspirations.

Here are several ways in which the fact that all students will be transfer students will transform higher education:

1. Traditional measures of success for access, retention, and graduation, will become obsolete. If most students bring credit with them, there is no such thing as a "freshman class," retention will not be controllable (since students will move easily among several institutions), and four-year graduation rates will mean very little, since few campuses will provide the entirety of a student's education.
2. The idea of a curriculum will be unstable. Curricula rely on students taking courses in sequence, or at least in an order required by the institution.  But transfer students will not join an institution with the same academic backgrounds, and so therefore won't want (or shouldn't want) to take courses in sequence.  Curricula must look like networks, not lines, and learning must include opportunities to make meaning of learning outside of a standardized sequence of courses.
3. The freshman year will be less important.  For the past two decades colleges and universities have focused on improving the first-year and placing distinctive programs in it.  But given the increasing number of students coming with credit and knowledge of varying sorts, the first year will be much less important than the last year, presumably the only time when most students at an institution will be able to have a common experience.
4. The most important skills for faculty will be aggregation, meaning-making, and certification, not teaching, learning, research, or any other currently popular aspects of pedagogy. It will fall to faculty to work with students to help them aggregate their prior learning from a variety of institutions and sources, make meaning out of it, add to that store of knowledge, and then certify that that knowledge adds up to something that can be carried along.
5. Colleges and universities will specialize more than ever before. If students are transferring knowledge and credits from many sources, only those institutions with identifiable specialties will be able to stand out among standardized options.
6. The most important alliances between institutions will be among unlike, not like, institutions. Currently nearly every alliance--athletic conferences, consortia, lobbying groups, faculty development networks, etc.--are among similar institutions.  Westminster is part of the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of institutions of similar size and programming.  The University of Utah has just joined the Pac-12 to be with schools more like it. But in a transfer world, schools will want to ally themselves with a network of differing institutions in order to maximize learning for (and revenue from) students.  We will see more formal alliances between community colleges and liberal arts colleges, research universities and teaching institutions, so that within a network of schools a student can get all the learning s/he desires, and individual campuses can contribute specific things of value to the learning of particular students.

Cost, quality, and freedom, or, can you crowdsource an education?

In Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky argues that the invention of movable type had three impacts on intellectual culture: it reduced the cost of publication, increased people's freedom to publish, and initially, lowered the quality of the things that were published.  Over time, though, the increase in freedom brought about an increase in creativity, innovation, and learning.  The sum total of the quality of published things has never returned to the glory days of publishing--there is much more dreck for sale today than when monks carefully illuminated manuscripts.  But we are substantially better off as a culture, and people who want to publish are better off as well.

For educators concerned about the cost and quality of education, there is much to learn in Shirky's brief account. Two things come immediately to mind.  The first is that colleges and universities cannot make meaningful progress on cost and quality without asking serious questions about freedom--Who will shape the curriculum? Under which rules? Who will decide what is good?

The second is that the key voices in this discussion need to be the potential producers of learning. By this I do not mean that students ought to choose.  Nor do I mean that faculty or administrators ought to be the source of innovation in learning.  Instead I mean that regardless of role, people who see themselves as creators of learning should be the ones who create it.

Shirky makes this point too, as he notes that technology makes it possible for people who were once only consumers to become collaborators.  Online this means bloggers and coders and social entrepreneurs and all the other people who band together to jointly solve problems or have fun.  In education I suspect this means crowdsourcers--people who can call together experts in many fields--both content and delivery--to create custom educations.  You might imagine a day when colleges and universities collaborate with their students to pull together courses and learning experiences from around the world, leading to an education that is cost-effective, high-quality, and, in the political sense, free.

Learning from Learnable.com; or starting a college and getting paid

Over the past couple of years I have blogged several times about what it would take to start a college or university today:

Here and here I posted about the notion of "Charter Universities"--where states would adopt the model used for charter schools to encourage innovators to provide higher education as well.

Here I mused about whether an "emergent" model of change could lead to the creation of a college.

This essay noted some of the "mysteries' in education--things we don't currently do well--and proposed ways to arrange a school that made money by responding to them.  And this one wondered how you could monetize learning as opposed to classes.  These posts have mused about ways to make use of open learning resources.  And this one suggested that private universities ought to start junior colleges.

Having said all this, there are essentially 3 big barriers to starting a college or university today.  The first is the cost associated with building a campus.  Even schools like the  University of Phoenix that rent their buildings have significant space costs.  And the cost of building a new campus, especially one that includes science, would be enormous.  The second is accreditation.  Without accreditation, students cannot get federal financial aid, and without accreditation, diplomas have almost no meaning.  But getting accredited means many years of work, years during which whatever students you can gather have to take it on trust that their expenditures will produce something that has meaning.

People who have responded to these two issues have often done it by focusing on supporting learning online.  The most famous example today is Khan Academy--a learning center than began on YouTube and now boasts thousands of videos on discrete topics in math, science, and other areas.  Khan Academy has hundreds of thousands of fans, and just got an infusion of money and support from Bill Gates.

But these free online learning models have not resolved the accreditation problem, and in fact aren't really interested in becoming colleges or universities.  And they often run on a non-profit model, where they rely for funding on donations.

All of which makes the recent re-launch of Learnable.com more interesting.  Learnable is the first site I've seen that allows producers of learning content to get paid by the users of that content.

 Looked at one way, Learnable is like Etsy.com, a site that allows craftspeople to sell their wares.  Looked at another way, though, it is a combination learning management system and back office for a college or university.  With Learnable, then, a group of people who want to start an actual college or university have access to the resources to run the school, manage the courses, and handle much of the financial end of the business.  I wouldn't be surprised to see new, small colleges and universities pop up on Learnable, either as a supplement to regular face-to-face courses, or as the platform for their entire institutions.

Millions of sages on millions of stages

One frequently expressed view of higher education's future is that the availability of content on the web will usher in an age when faculty have less incentive to be sages on stages and more to be guides on the sides of student learning.  It seems equally likely, though, that technology will actually increase the influence of sages on stages.  Here is why:

1. Many online venues for content are "sage-focused."  Consider YouTube, where anyone who wants to can make themselves a sage, presenting their wisdom for free to as many as will take it.  Even "open content" sites are likely to contribute to sage-ness.  Consider MIT's OpenCourseware site.  Seen one way it is an opportunity for students all over the world to direct their learning by getting content from the world's best professors.  Seen another way, it is home to content that is appealing precisely because of the  perceived sagacity of the faculty whose courses are posted there.

2. The current cultural climate, enhanced by social networking and other web trends, is that users seek out those opinions that agree with their own.  Friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, fans of Obama or Palin; Fox or MSNBC, are more likely now than ever to listen only to those with whom they agree.  This tendency enhances the influence of sages, whose power and presence expand with the number of their loyal followers.  Glenn Beck University anyone?

The future of learning, then, may not be about sages becoming guides, but instead about a competition among sages, in the classroom and on the web, for acolytes to follow their every pronouncement.  Not a bright future to be sure, either for learning or for democracy.

Getting a Start in Open Learning

The NY Times ran an excellent piece yesterday on the state and future of open learning. It got me thinking about how institutions like Westminster who have done very little in this area might get a start.

It describes four models of open learning:
1. The MIT OpenCourseWare model (also used by Yale) where videos of classes, along with (sometimes) syllabi and other course documents are posted online. Anyone can view them, but students cannot get a grade, communicate with faculty, or demonstrate their learning in any significant way.

2. The Carnegie-Mellon approach, which has put full courses online--including simulations, tests, etc. and then marketed them to students and to community colleges. The Carnegie-Mellon approach has so far developed 10 courses at $250K each with plans for four more. These courses are at least focused on learning (as opposed to teaching) and students can get credit for completing them.

3. The hybrid course model, where students complete some of their work online, thus freeing up classroom space for more students.

4. The Peer to Peer Model where new institutions like Peer to Peer University offer courses that can eventually add up to the learning equivalent to a degree, but which do not offer degrees (due to accreditation and other obstacles.) P2PU bundles open source materials with a moderator who helps engage students with learning and provides evaluations of student work. P2PU aims to have its students demonstrate their competence through portfolios, etc. rather than through a formal credential.

So for an institution who hasn't gone far in any of these directions, and who focuses on student learning, which is the best path to follow? It seems to me that only the third and fourth have any promise, and that the fourth is particularly interesting. Here is why: The first two models take a huge influx of resources, and they rely largely on a teaching model--faculty delivering learning to students. Big and wealthy schools will always have the advantage here.

Hybrid courses, and programs built around them, are interesting too, but they require a major redesign of the course to be successful. Such redesigns take time and money.

The fourth model seems to be the opening because it is built on a collaborative model. Imagine a partnership where a tech company, content experts, and a college got together. The tech folks provide the infrastructure, based in social networking. The content people, experts in their fields, either develop content or more productively scour the web for the best stuff out there. And the college's faculty link in to coach students and evaluate the learning. Faculty thus continue in their favored roles without having to take on a ton of new tasks. The college doesn't have to create its own technological infrastructure. The organizations share the risk and they split the rewards.

Of course cost is the question--what can a partnership like this charge students and still make money? But still it seems that partnership building rather than starting from zero is the best bet. And it draws on the best-developed skills of faculty--not in using technology or re-working courses to have a web-based bent, but in supporting student learning.

What do we make of the shakeout in higher ed open content?

First, a disclaimer. I am a neophyte in the opencourseware/open content world. But I've been following it for the past year, and am involved in Westminster's efforts to figure out how to play in that world. And if you follow this blog (all three of you :-)) then you will know it is central to some of my thinking about cost and quality in higher ed.

Having said that, it seems to me that over the past couple of months there have been some major changes in the higher ed open content landscape. First, Utah State University got rid of its opencourseware project, the second largest in the US. Second, MIT released a report on the costs of hosting its OCW project, with some ideas about how to sustain it in the future without the major institutional and grant funding that made it possible in headier economic times. Third, the Mellon Foundation consolidated one of its major grant programs that had funded a lot of open content work and its two grant officers left the foundation.

What do these three things imply?
1. They do not imply that open content or opencourseware are going out the window. There are still lots of efforts out there, and lots of successes to be noticed.

2. They do imply that individual institutions of higher education will struggle to provide open content infrastructure necessary for the "revolution" in learning that some people expect. (Check out this recent issue of the journal IRRODL for some of the revolution language.)

3. They suggest that the same economic downturn that makes open content attractive as an alternative to expensive higher education makes it difficult to provide that open content.

4. If (3) is correct, then future open content infrastructure will be more likely to be provided by for-profit companies (i.e. youtube.edu; ITunesU, etc.) or the federal government than by individual institutions of higher ed.

5. If individual institutions want to stay at the front, it seems that they ought to specialize. The future seems not to be MIT providing an entire university worth of courses online for free, but instead institutions leading in areas of their speciality. MIT in engineering, Utah State in agriculture, who (???) in liberal arts.

Who Wants to Start a Junior College?

NPR ran a story this morning about the struggles of community colleges. The down economy has pushed up enrollments even while states are cutting budgetary support. The result is over-enrollment, long lines, larger classes, and (likely) further declines in completion of Associates Degrees or transfer to 4-year schools. (These numbers are already dismally low.)

This is a huge problem, given that community colleges enroll more than half of the students in higher ed, and given that a large proportion of those students are first-generation, low-income, or from underserved populations.

It is also an opportunity for innovative four-year schools to serve a new body of students. I'm suggesting that private (see my previous post) colleges start new junior colleges. Here are the components of the model:

1. open enrollment with a twist--students for the new school, (let's call it WJC) would be eligible for admission with a HS diploma, but would have to apply in order to make sure they are a good fit for the institution.
2. a tight, well-defined curriculum--community colleges have sprawling curricula, as they aim to serve all students. WJC would have a liberal education curriculum only, pointed at learning outcomes--critical thinking, excellent communication, and civic engagement. Courses would be interdisciplinary and problem-based, so that liberal arts disciplines are clearly connected to the real world.
3. open-source content--faculty would facilitate learning, not provide all of the content. That content would be culled from the world of open learning. As a result WJC wouldn't need traditional academic departments, but instead faculty comfortable in a range of disciplines, skilled at getting students to drive their own learning, passionate about education, and willing to mentor and guide students. An additional benefit of the open-source content is that courses wouldn't meet on the traditional schedule, 3 times a week for 50 minutes. Instead, courses would meet less commonly, for longer periods, to accommodate student schedules.
4. no PhD requirement for faculty--most good private schools have a pool of long-term adjuncts, skilled in the classroom but lacking the PhD. These teachers would be the core of the faculty.
5. rich academic and social support--many students leave community colleges because of problems at home and work, not because of academic difficulty. WJC would provide a rich landscape of support--face-to-face and online--to ensure that students stay enrolled and succeed. Much of that support would come from the faculty, to ensure that the school cares for the student, and the student doesn't feel that s/he is being shuttled from one place to another, as they do in large institutions.
6. low cost--tuition could be pegged at the tuition rate of public four-year schools. That might mean that students pay $4,000 a semester. If there were one faculty member/advisor for every 20 students, the economics would work.

Why would a private college do this? Civic reasons to be sure--for they would be serving students who will make up an ever larger portion of the citizenry. Educational reasons--for a school like this would be a source of innovation. But financial reasons also--for this model would bring a whole new group of students into the fold. Some portion of them might transfer to the sponsoring private institution (let's call it WC), but even if they don't, WC would have a way to bring income from a couple of hundred new students into its coffers. As James Tooley points out in The Beautiful Tree it is this combination of motives that causes low-cost private schools to flourish across the developing world. Why couldn't it work here?

Does Free Content = Cheap Education?

Wired editor Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (article-length summary here) argues that the future will be shaped by "free" products--digital versions of things that cost almost nothing to produce and can be had for free by consumers. Profits will be made by getting people to pay for the things that surround the "free." So, for example, Red Hat makes money not off its linux-based software but from providing support. Or Google makes money not from search, but from advertising that exists around free search.

Malcolm Gladwell published a critical review of Free in this week's New Yorker. Gladwell points out that many things that appear to be free, actually cost a great deal of money--YouTube, for example, which is losing a half billion dollars a year by providing a free site to post and view video.

There are at least two key reasons why free isn't free. For content providers infrastructure to provide the free costs money. So even though storage is almost free, YouTube spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on storage. For consumers, the absence of price drops a key indicator of quality. So a free video or piece of software may be good or it may be horrible. Without price, the market cannot indicate its value. (Of course there are rating systems on sites like YouTube--they seem to provide very little meaningful guidance on quality, though.)

These two points are essential for thinking about the educational implications of "free." We are now at the point where enough content for an entire education can be had for free. Many people, myself included, are hoping that free content can reduce the cost of education.

But educational cost won't go down unless we can figure out the infrastructure problem and the quality problem. Right now, most free content is actually heavily subsidized. MIT's OpenCourseWare project, for example, is only free because MIT is willing to pay faculty and staff to post their courses for free, and cover the storage costs. Higher education is providing a real civic service by providing "free" content, but that doesn't mean the content is actually free.

The quality problem is two-fold. Right now, a lot of the free content is poorly done, or provided in educationally useless formats. And, very few of the free content providers also provide the sort of service around the content that ensures that learning takes place. Or put another way, few providers have followed Red Hat's model of excellent free content and rich, useful, top quality support.

So it seems the real area for innovation is not in open source learning content. Instead it is in re-building educational institutions so that they can respond to the infrastructure, quality, and service challenges out there.

Cost, Quality, and Textbooks

I learned yesterday about a new federal regulation that will require electronic course schedules, generally posted before students register for classes, to list the textbooks that the class will require. Its purpose is to make college textbook buying cheaper for students, since they will know which books they need well before the semester begins and can get them online.

The announcement of this regulation met with some groans at a meeting I was attending. Since generally faculty don't select books anywhere near that early, the conversation went, the college will have to figure out a way to change faculty behavior. Or, we'll have to figure out how to comply with the regulation without "inconveniencing" faculty.

Sine the meeting I've been thinking about the cost/quality issue as it plays out with this regulation. We're spending a lot of time trying to change the typical relationship between cost and quality, which is that as cost goes up, quality goes up as well. So the question here is this: does this regulation, whose purpose is to reduce cost, have the potential to improve the quality of learning?

The answer is maybe. It certainly has the potential not to improve quality. It could simply have no effect on student learning. It could also have a negative effect, since by requiring faculty to select textbooks so far in advance it forces them to put content considerations will ahead of pedagogy, objectives, or student learning. The result would be a quiet shift towards instruction and away from learning.

But it might improve quality. Here is how. Let's say faculty balk at selecting textbooks 6 to 8 months before a course is taught. This natural reluctance could be the way to nudge them away from textbooks altogether. Instead of building classes around a list of books, deans, administrators, faculty developers, and other faculty could use this regulation as an incentive to build courses around problems, or open source learning, or service-learning, or any of the other activities that shift the focus away from instruction towards learning (without requiring a textbook to do it).

The result would be the creation of the right relationship between cost and quality. Cost would go down for students as they bought fewer textbooks. And quality would go up, as faculty worried less about providing canned content and more about providing a rich environment in which students can learn.

Thinking about demand

In response to a recent post about demand for tech-enabled learning, my friend and colleague Peter Ingle wondered how much demand there is for any sort of schooling--on-line or not--among the demographic groups who are supposed to drive the open learning/tech-enabled education upswing. (His full response is here.)

His post raises two issues for me. First, the "education crisis" is nearly always seen as a problem with schools, or at least with the suppliers of education. But certainly there are characteristics on the demand side that account for the differences in educational attainment between the US and other developed nations. What are they and who is thinking about them?

Second, we need to be much more precise when we talk about demand. There are at least three types of demand in this area: demand for learning, demand for education, and demand for schooling.

Demand for learning, in my mind, is that desire to find out something interesting or useful. It tends to be short-term and idiosyncratic, but also relatively easily met. So, for example, I want to learn about trail running shoes. I go to TrailRunner magazine or IRunFar, read a review, and make a decision. YouTube makes this sort of learning easy, but so do the library, Wikipedia, etc.

Demand for schooling is that desire to attend and graduate from school with some sort of official credential. Public schools, charters, private schools, colleges and universities all try to meet this demand. It is longer-term, and less idiosyncratic since students with the desire for schooling either choose (or are led into) a particular field of study and set of courses. It is also often extrinsically motivated. On-line schools are starting to make some headway here, but they don't differ significantly from physical schools, in that they both provide the same sort of structure--formally designed learning opportunities leading to a credential. I care a lot about school reform, but I have to acknowledge that schooling will always be fraught since students have so many ways to opt out, and since the value of schooling is uncertain to many (Peter's point.)

Demand for education is, to me, the most interesting. It is the longest-term desire, one that goes well beyond the search for information to the search for meaning. It can be met outside of physical or virtual schools, and it doesn't require a diploma as evidence of achievement. But it has the most rigorous, and the most student-driven, intrinsic goals. Its outcomes are the most significant for the life of a person and her/his family, because they touch on a person's conception of self and place in the world. (The School of Life is a school meeting the demand for education.)

It is my sense that schools and open learning folks would do well to find more ways to attend to demand for education, even if it means not driving everyone to graduation. This suggests that schools and open learning ought not consider themselves in a competition. Nor should we think that one should vanquish the other. Both will fail to meet the expanded demand unless they can figure out how to meet the educational needs of the publics they serve. If it is important to the student that the educational desires are accompanied by a diploma, then good. But we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that the biggest questions and struggles of life are solved by schooling or learning. They are solved in diverse and complicated ways by people who value and seek education.

Does demographic change = demand for tech-driven education?

Yesterday I participated in a webinar called The Future of Non-Traditional Higher Education in the US (white paper version of the webinar available here.) The presenter, Nick Allen (provost emeritus and university professor at Univ. MD--University College) reiterated a common argument. It goes like this:

• higher ed faces huge demographic changes--more hispanic, first-generation, immigrant, and adult learners will be seeking higher education than ever before.
• higher ed in the US won't work for many of them because of cost and poor fit
• Web 2.0 and open learning initiatives make online or tech enabled education much simpler
• Therefore, the solution to the educational challenges raised by demographic change is providing tech-driven (as opposed to "bricks and mortar") education.

I agree that demographic and economic trends portend major changes in higher education. And I agree that Web 2.0 and open learning can do a good job of providing online educational opportunities. But I am not sure that the two will meet up. Put another way, I'm not sure that the millions of new degree seekers, be they young Hispanics or baby boomers looking for new careers, will seek that education from the purveyors of Web 2.0 learning.

Two reasons for my skepticism. The first is oft-noted: none of the major new college-bound demographic groups, as a whole, show a predilection for or success at tech-driven ed. (This of course does not hold true for individual members of these groups, and may change in the future.)

The second is that Web 2.0 and open learning folks, in my view, haven't thought about their efforts in a way that will engage those groups of students.

Among the insights of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point is that social change is driven by people playing certain roles. Mavens provide expertise, salesmen convince people to join movements for social change, and connectors build the social networks that unite mavens and salesmen on one hand, with potential joiners on the other.

The tech and open learning movements aren't thinking about themselves as part of a social movement. So they use mavens to share information in the hopes that education-seekers will find them.

If I was trying to engage potential college-goers in Web 2.0 education I would be looking for the connectors--people with on-the-ground influence and networks among members of the targeted demographic groups. And I would find ways to get my product--education--into the hands of real people so they could use it for real needs. Planning a party? Here is a way to use open learning sources to make it better. Facing a business problem? Here are cases to help you think about it. Have broader educational needs? Maybe UMUC (or any of the hundreds of other options) can work for you.

Doing it this way accomplishes two things: it meets people where they are, and it doesn't assume that huge swaths of human society will flock to open learning because of its technological cool.