I took two Uber rides today while I was in Washington, D.C. for a conference. It seems obvious that the Uber model of transportation is superior to traditional taxi service. Think about process. With Uber, I make my location, destination, even my identity known to the service provider, whose name and mug I know, not by raising my hand or whistling, but by raising my “ethereal” hand, which is much bigger and can be seen at a greater distance. The transaction happens before the service provider even gets to me. There’s no uncertainty, quibbling, and I don’t need my wallet – only my smartphone. During the trip, I know exactly how long it will take, where we are, and the shortest route. If we pickup someone along the way (for a reduced fee), I know their names as well.

None of these features, which add value to the service, are provided by traditional taxi services. Uber has more value added features, is more efficient, and is cheaper in most cases. In fact, I can only find two problems with Uber and both of them are the result of people. First, the human drivers for Uber want to unionize. Seattle is leading the way in Chamber of Commerce v. City of Seattle in which the city states it wants to, “…be a ‘laboratory’ for testing innovative policy responses to the problems created by new technologies and the changing economy.” So they want to be innovative by boosting costs (i.e., making them less competitive with their traditional taxi counterparts), regulating the industry, and making it more like the traditional model.  Hmm. Second, the press has given lots of play to recent Uber autonomous vehicle crashes, in my opinion, to discredit autonomous vehicles which Uber supports and wants to implement in the future. Both of these issues stem from humans wanting to keep in place the old way of doing things. In Uber, we see a perfect example of technology disruption. In essence, technology disrupts while people, processes, and policies resist change.

We see the same thing in higher education when technology creates disruption to the traditional processes of education favored by those that want to hold on to the old ways. During one of my sessions today, I threw out a statement the group: “The primary reason to get an undergraduate degree is to get a better job.” While many of the people around the table agreed with me, several balked, asking where the “liberal arts” education fit in.  It seemed that they wanted to unionize.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in a “classical” liberal arts education because it teaches literacy, logic, critical thought, and a host of other skills that are useful (and also happen to be valued by employers). But, as I’ve commented in a previous post, in the future we can’t get away with defining the benefits of a classical education in traditional terms. Our users want more useful features. We must redefine our curricula by what skills a student masters, not how well they perform on the curve. We must adapt to the disruptive trends we see in higher education – competency-based education, cheaper delivery, convenience to the student, micro-certified, and based upon the skills that employers want.

How can we deliver education like Uber delivers transportation? If we don’t, we will find ourselves driving empty taxis, waiting for students to whistle.

A number of initiatives and circumstances have aligned to push the topic of microcredentialing to the surface in the higher education space. Specifically, disruption in traditional undergraduate degree expectations, greater need to demonstrate skills to employers, and heightened control and privacy concerns. Let’s take each of these topics in turn.

Disruption in Traditional Undergraduate Degree Programs

While prestige continues to convince potential students that the value of a Tier 1 research institution (like Texas A&M) may be worth the time/money/effort, the rise of MOOCs and certification-oriented programs are chipping away at the value proposition. As Christenson and Eyring point out, universities’ tendencies to become bigger and better can blind them to disruptive technologies (Christensen & Eyring, 2011). I believe that is what’s happening now, and if we in higher education do not adapt to the new reality, we will begin to fall behind.

We see some examples of successful adaptation. The Academic Innovation initiative and the University of Michigan (http://ai.umich.edu/) is one example. What makes such a program successful is the implementation of three strategic goals;

1. Categorizing or un-bundling of skills and learning outcomes within university courses – that is, identifying outcomes and competencies taught within a course that directly map to marketable skills that employers want.
2. Creating technology infrastructure to support the new academic economy – once course competencies are un-bundled, infrastructure to support the documentation and dissemination of those skill tokens must be in place.
3. Creating new and flexible certification paths – The four-year predetermined bachelor’s degree will continue to lose marketability as the new academic economy takes shape. Persuading the faculty to adapt to the new paths of certification is a daunting task, especially for large, traditional Tier 1 institutions (like Texas A&M).

Demonstrated Skills to Employers

An important purpose of any undergraduate course of study is to make the graduate highly marketable in the workplace. But if I have a bachelor’s degree in architecture, what does that mean? Historically, employers have placed great weight on the prestige of the granting institution. If my degree is from Harvard, it carries more gravitas than say, the same degree from MyOnlineU. But the cost of a degree from a prestigious university is putting it more out of reach for average students. While they may prefer to go to Harvard, time, money, and convenience dictate another solution. Furthermore, I can send an employer my transcript, but the level of information will be the course. I will have a course title and a grade. Again, employers are left to infer skills taught and therefore the value of any given course. This will not continue to be “good enough.” The National Association of Colleges and Employers has begun to map some of the skills employers want, and it is rare that they are explicitly identified in traditional courses (Gray & Koncz, 2017). Creating educational support systems (both technical and administrative) will provide potential employers with greater detail about a potential employee’s skills, and I believe will make them more marketable in the long run.

Control and Privacy

How do students certify their academic credentials today? They contact the registrar, pay a fee, wait 5-7 business days, and then get a paper copy of their transcript with degrees awarded. By that time, an employer may have already hired another candidate and furnished their office. And who ultimately has control of the credential? Why, the university, of course. The new academic economy will require that learners have control of their own credentials; that is, the ability to selectively send them to whomever they wish, and only the credentials that matter. The method must be verifiable and robust enough to withstand the demise of credentialing agent. Blockchain technology promises to solve much of this case, and there are a few companies working on solving problems unique to academia, which are numerous. There is an open source project, borne out of the MIT Media Lab, named blockcert that demonstrates promise (“Blockchain Credentials,” 2018).

The Most Intractable Problem

I believe the hardest problem to solve won’t be the deconstruction of skills, or even the technology infrastructure. Faculty, especially at large institutions, are notorious for resisting change. The coming disruption will soon be more than an annoyance. Will our faculty be willing to change the way we think about what undergraduate education means? Can we recast our conception of certification? Will our university be up to the challenge? There are some indications that we have a Provost that understands the coming change. With strong leadership, I believe we will navigate the new academic economy successfully.

This article from Inside Higher Ed reports that Canvas has surpassed Blackboard as the leading learning management system in American colleges and universities, based upon the number of installations. Michael Feldstein from MindWires Consulting states that this is a “stunning development.” Really? My colleagues have been saying for a number of years that Canvas is a superior product to Blackboard. Talking to our buddies down the road at t.u. who switched to Canvas about 5 years ago, they think it was one of the best moves they made.

As a user of Blackboard for my classes, I can say with some authority that is difficult to use, slow, and the students don’t like it very much. I would like to see at least an assessment of how Canvas would work at our institution. But it looks like there is little impetus at the university level for this at the present time. I have some committee assignments where I may be able to use my influence to further the conversation, but would be interested in what others within the TAMU community think about the issue.