DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education: the transforming of higher education continues. Can we see the light yet?

Norris, Donald M.

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming

Transformation of Higher Education

Chelsea Green Publishing Company 2010

208 pages

ISBN 978-1-60358-234-6

by Anya Kamenetz

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Anya Kamenetz has become a familiar voice in the blogosphere, channeling the experiences of young people getting started in the forbidding economy of the 21st century. Her first book, Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back (Kamenetz 2006) analyzed the travails of Millennials in the workforce, years before the Great Recession turned bad conditions even worse. She followed with articles in Fast Company, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and her blog "The Narrow Bridge" (see anyakamenetz.blogspot.com). In late 2009, her article in Fast Company, "Who Needs Harvard?" declared that free online courses, Wiki universities, and Facebook-style tutoring networks that enable "do-it-yourself" (DIY) learning were being deployed by a cadre of Web-savvy "edupunks" in a manner that could transform American higher education (Kamenetz 2009). This article was acclaimed by many champions of open educational resources and developers of Web 2.0-based approaches to learning and competence building. It also resonated with the legion of educators waging ongoing campaigns to change prevailing institutional cultures and practices.

Kamenetz's latest book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, sets an even higher goal. Its purpose is to inspire people to think seriously about profoundly changing our approach to postsecondary education, personal learning, and employment. The American model for universal higher education is acclaimed around the world. It has even become a sort of "cargo cult" for developing countries. But the author finds our current version to be too expensive, too complex, and too bundled. Moreover, American higher education is based on physical campuses that have been participating in a form of competitive arms race of campus amenities, expanded services, and proliferating administrative functions and staffs.

The author asserts that technology is key to transformation, enabling the learner to be placed at the center of the equation. Technology also enables the separation of experiences, resources, and functions (such as teaching, learning, research, socialization, public services, assessment, and certification of competence) that are currently interwoven in today's complex university. She identifies four trends as supporting this transformation:

* The 80/20 rule. By this the author means that there is much more to American higher education than the medallion universities and liberal arts colleges and their population of high-achieving learners interested in traditional learning pathways. The great mass of students learn in unselective institutions, community colleges, and market-driven institutions, including the working adults addressed in Michael Offerman's blog "The Other 85 Percent" (see www.theother85percent.com). Most of these students would benefit from the transformation of learning options and pathways available to them.

* The great unbundling. Complex, bundled enterprises and professions such as music, film, and journalism are being deconstructed all around us, their old practices dissolved by the solvent of technology and new media. Similarly, unbundled, specialized learning competitors are appearing on the learning scene and are likely to increase dramatically in coming years. Traditional institutions will not disappear, but a wide array of fresh options will erode their appeal to certain types of learners.

* Techno-hybridization. The author cites research by the U.S. Department of Education stating that "blended" learning experiences are superior to traditional learning or fully online learning alone. So technology-enabled approaches will continue to permeate into traditional practices, providing greater value.

* Personal learning networks and paths. Kamenetz asserts that the traditional learning path should be only one of a variety of options available to learners. Only one in 10 Americans graduates from high school at 18 and goes straight through four years of college. A flexible arsenal of personal learning options is needed to reach the full range of possible learners, including high school dropouts, working adults, and recent graduates who wish to fill a few knowledge gaps sufficient to achieve employment, followed by continuing competence building.

The transformation imperative and the trends supporting it are long-familiar concepts to readers of Planning for Higher Education and members of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). It is instructive to see how Kamenetz both rediscovers those concepts and adds new ways to put the learner at the center. Fifteen years ago, SCUP published Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century (Dolence and Norris 1995). Michael Dolence and I contended that universal higher education in both the United States and globally, faced with explosive growth and emulation of American success, would prove profoundly unaffordable using the prevailing model. Furthermore, learning needed to be not just unbundled, but realigned, redefined, redesigned, and reengineered to meet the needs of the Knowledge Economy. What was aspired to in that vision, but was restricted by the technology of the day, was to support people in forms of learning that were fast, fluid, flexible, and affordable, including with peers and from mentors.

At the same time as that transformative vision was being presented, Baumol and Blackman's (1995) article, "How to Think About Rising College Costs," appeared in Planning for Higher Education. The authors asserted that unless and until technology was used to change the basic patterns and cadences of the practice of higher education and health care in ways that would reduce costs, their costs would continue to mushroom to unacceptable levels. Since that warning was issued, technology has been layered atop the prevailing "handicraft" practices of education and health care, rather than transforming them. This has made them more expensive and less empowering for learners at the same time that other technology-supported services in the marketplace have been declining in relative cost and have become potentially empowering. Consequently, the percentage of our gross domestic product that we spend on health care and education has ballooned to unsustainable levels. Much attention has been focused on runaway costs rather than on the even more worrying possible fall in graduate quality, as measured for example by the ability to go beyond course content and thereby add value. Moreover, public support of higher education has declined, and the rate of tuition increase has dramatically exceeded the consumer price index, thus heaping greater burdens on learners and their families. Kamenetz and her Millennial cohorts have suffered from this inexorable process. They are the canaries in the coal mine regarding the affordability of higher education.

This book is provocative and introduces the reader to a whole new cast of characters more accustomed to tweet than to tweed. Perhaps the greatest strength of Kamenetz's book--and there are many--is that she provides a fresh and compelling view of the transformative potential of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking practices, open educational resources, and the cascading waves of new devices: smartphones, iPods, iPads, their imitators, and coming waves of digital gizmos that enable and empower new mobile learning experiences. The second part of her book, "How We Get There" takes the reader on an engaging and eye-opening journey into the world of edupunks (learners and mentors using these new tools) and edupreneurs (creators of new and reinvented organizations seeking to turn these new forms and experiences into viable, sustainable enterprises). The reader can use the last chapter, "Resource Guide for a Do-It-Yourself Education" to surf and sample a variety of the new elements of the DIY learning experience, and this guided tour is worth the price of the book in itself.

The author also explores the issue of how peer-to-peer and DIY learning could be evaluated by employers, who currently rely on colleges and universities to sort, select, and certify talent and competence. She cites a list of existing sites--behance.com, koda.com, and brazencareerist.com--that illustrate how peer-to-peer judgments and recommendations could be used to attract recruiters in locating and vetting top talent.

I especially like Kamenetz's formulation that to succeed in the 21st century, America must transform education and the economy in tandem. This requires (1) allocating funding for success, assuring that public funding goes to public needs, (2) supporting many pathways to learning and competence, and (3) fixing both education and the economy to unleash innovation and create more jobs across the full range of the workforce. Since 2000, the American economy has not performed well in this regard. America spends more money on health care than anyone else in the world. The same is true in education, but we are not getting our money's worth in the full range of the educationforce/workforce.

In my judgment, Kamenetz is less sure-footed in dealing with the transformation imperative's impact on traditional institutions of higher education. She is a journalist, not a higher education insider. This provides her the advantage of an outsider's detached perspective (she sees clearly some of the options that are seen as off-limits within higher education), but not an insider's judgment and deep knowledge (about not fixing the parts of higher education that not only aren't broken but will harm our society if they get broken). To be sure, she has engaged an impressive cadre of leaders and practitioners--Brit Kirwan on efficiency savings, Carol Twigg on course reinvention and academic productivity, John Meyer on the sociology of universities, Jane Wellman and Kevin Carey on college costs, and David Wiley on open educational resources and transformation, to name but a few. She has extracted from them a worthy set of ideas, insights, and recommendations. But to my taste, her synthesis of these ideas is sometimes less than the sum of its parts.

She also understates the roles of important contextual elements. For example, the full impact of the Great Recession has not yet been felt. Short-term cutbacks have been focused on "staunching the flow" and have been mitigated by stimulus dollars. Even without Kamenetz's threat of DIY University and other variants of free-at-point-of-consumption higher education, institutional financial resources over the next three years are expected to continue to decline sharply, especially when the stimulus is gone, requiring not just the sort of efficiency savings yielded by the well-regarded University of Maryland efficiency program, but genuine innovations and transformations that will yield far greater enhancements in academic and administrative productivity (Norris and Baer 2009). Learners who have made the decision to attend traditional institutions will bring intense pressure to accelerate completion and reduce the total cost of achieving their objectives. Another important contextual factor is the need for transformation to extend to include PreK-20 education, not just higher education. This will be necessary to broadly enable accelerated degree completion and concurrently to deal with the current remediation crisis. Given the scope of the issues already undertaken by Kamenetz in this book, however, she can be forgiven for not taking on PreK-20 as well.

The American research university is at risk of harm in this cost-driven drive to transform the higher education system. It is an impressive model for serving the interwoven needs of learning, research, innovation, entrepreneurship, commercialization of new knowledge, public services, and community building. It is an excellent vehicle for achieving pinnacles of excellence that support innovation and commercialization of new ideas at globally-elite levels. But it is not a model that fits the continuing learning needs and means of the entire population. Nor is it clear how adaptable such complex organizations can be to genuine reinvention rather than incremental adjustment. Clay Shirky's (2010) recent blog posting, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models," based on Joseph Tainter's (1988) book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, questioned whether complex organizations, especially those burdened with their own bureaucracies, would be adaptable enough to respond to fundamental, tectonic shifts in their marketplace. The current round of challenges posed by the Great Recession, the affordability crisis, and now DIY U will test the capacity of even the greatest of our bundled universities to demonstrate nimble resilience.

In conclusion, this is a provocative, important book. It frames these important issues in a direct, journalistic style that is sure to attract a wider audience than insiders' books on the subject. Kamenetz will surely be tempted soon to write the sequel (perhaps "Fixing DIY Disasters: How U.S. Graduates Got Their Groove Back"?), either looking back from the future or looking to the future, maybe influenced by higher education futurists such as Paul Lefrere (see, for example, Lefrere 2007) and their projects on DIY universities for global audiences (for example, www.role-project.eu). Either way, I anticipate that she will be able to report on lots of failed experiments in the sustainability of free-to-consume courses, whether self-assembled (DIY) or not, and she will find a smaller but respectable number of viable, sustainable, fully transformed instances of higher learning that deliver the success that America needs and that enable learners to live their dreams within their means. Meanwhile, America continues to need globally-elite levels of excellence and innovation, sufficient to generate the surplus wealth that we need to invest in our futures. If Kamenetz's readers can take us past the free-trumps-fee game of today to the more thoughtful and globally-aware debates that can accompany the choices that people make in DIY learning, that will be all to the good. St

References

Baumol, W. J, and S. A. B. Blackman. 1995. How to Think About Rising College Costs. Planning for Higher Education 23 (4): 1-7

Dolence, M. G., and D. M. Norris. 1995. Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century. Ann Arbor: Society for College and University Planning.

Kamenetz, A. 2006. Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back. New York: Riverhead Books.

--. 2009. Who Needs Harvard? How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education. Fast Company, September. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from the World Wide Web: www.fastcompa ny.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html.

Lefrere, P 2007. Competing Higher Education Futures in a Globalising World. European Journal of Education 42 (2): 201-212.

Norris, D. M., and L. Baer. 2009. Linking Analytics to Lifting Out of Recession. National Symposium on Action Analytics white paper. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from the World Wide Web: www.strategicinitiatives.com/documents/Linking_Analytics_26sep09.pdf.

Shirky, C. 2010. The Collapse of Complex Business Models. Blog posting, April 1. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from the World Wide Web: www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/.

Tainter, J. A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Donald M. Norris is president of Strategic Initiatives, Inc. He has written six books and monographs for the Society for College and University Planning, including Transforming Higher Education (1995, with Michael Dolence), Transforming e-Knowledge (2003, with Jon Mason and Paul Lefrere) and A Guide to Planning for Change (2008, with Nick Poulton).