Transforming American Education, the U.S. Department of Education’s new plan for educational technology ( http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010 ), sets the goal of increasing the proportion of college graduates who have a two or four-year college degree from the current rate of 39 percent to sixty percent by the year 2020.   This is not an idle goal.  As Al Powell noted in an earlier posting, it is driven by the need for more highly educated workers in a knowledge economy.   It is a real need, not just a short-term policy goal.  It also presents the opportunity to move online learning into the mainstream as part of higher education’s overall response to the need to adjust to new societal needs.  There are several dimensions to this.

            First, of course, is the sheer scope of this projected growth in the higher education population.  Over the next decade, we will need to accommodate 53% growth in the student population.  Most institutions could not accommodate this kind of growth with their current physical infrastructure.  Online learning has already proven that it can help extend access to undergraduate degree programs for new student populations, while also improving the efficiency and effectiveness of delivering high-enrolling courses on campus.   We also are beginning to see new kinds of educational collaboration emerge as institutions strive to share content, share courses, and complement each others’ strengths.  All of these innovations could help us expand access to these new students.

            If we are to expand the number of students who get a higher education degree, we also need to worry about the pipeline:  More students need to graduate from high school prepared to move on to higher education.  This is a related goal in Transforming American Education.  Here, again, online learning can play an important role in at least two ways.  Digital content from online courses can be re-purposed for use by high school teachers—an extension of the Open Eductitonal Resources movement.  Beyond that, however, online courses can be used as “dual enrollment” courses that allow students to earn high school and college credit at the same time.  This not only ensures that graduating high school students are prepared to move on to college, it also gives them a head start toward a college degree.  In turn, institutions can more easily innovate with accelerated degrees that allow students to enter the workforce more quickly.

            Thirdly, we need to consider the learning process itself.  The Information Revolution demands new skills from both workers and citizens.  These include the ability to find and evaluate information, turn that information into useful knowledge, and apply that knowledge to solve problems, often in a collaborative, team environment.  The Knowledge Society demands a learning environment that is active and collaborative, inquiry-oriented, research-based, and problem-centered.  Online learning—both on-campus in hybrid courses and at a distance in fully online courses—allows us to achieve this kind of learning at the scale that will be needed as the number of students increases.

            This suggests that the next decade will be an exciting period for online learning and for our institutions as we grapple with the need to greatly expand access, prepare the pipeline for learning, and integrate new learning processes into our curricula.    Here are a couple of questions that I hope we can explore within the Sloan Community:

            (1) As online learning embraces this new societal mandate, what challenges will it encounter?

            (2) What innovations will help us meet the challenge?

Let’s discuss!