Of course one of the most famous College Professors in american history, had agreed that when all the way into the end of the century, in his book is a chapter called the american octopus come his way of signaling his continued disagreement with what when james had 30 years prior, made all the same point. But by that point it was much much too late really for the University Organizers of model to change. Theres sort of a wellknown phenomenon where once organizations become a certainly they become more like one another over time, just basic organizational theory. The question that interested me was why it has persisted for so long. These kinds of things happen all the time. Organizations form in certain ways and eventually some comes along with some new way of doing things and the world changes. And get virtually everything that robert said about university in 1934 you could say about universities now 80 years later. Why . I believe it has a lot less to do with the virtues of a model and the inevitability of the Higher Education model as we know today. And kind of an epic string of good luck that in some ways i dont think we can expect to continue. It was of course a great virtue that the American University model was made in america and not, say, and youre performing a great Higher Education institutions were decimated during the catastrophe of the beginning of the 20th century. Our universities were in the senator daschle power of the age in a tremendously wealthy growing nation, nation of immigrants were people were looking for means to uplift their childrens our colleges and universities as the way you would do that. The first nation were to decide to be a good idea to try to get everything on through high school, nation with the congress and a soda basic attempt to try to find something to do with returning veterans when they came back from world war ii. Why dont we send them to college instead that works up a commission to decide to fight the cold war by providing billions upon billions of dollars to Research Universities in order to conduct the research andmistake to compete with the soviet union. So my argument is that a wave of money and enrollment and good fortune overwhelms whatever internal contradictions might have been there all along and that we really only now in the time where in some ways those historical moment of good luck appreciate it. I will add one more the economy changed around us. You get to the point in history of american Higher Education it was a lot of social dissatisfaction, real doubts inside the academy about whether the institution would continue. It was a famous book published in the 1970s called the over educated american or a harvard economist predicted we were producing too many College Graduates and were about to enter a period in which their wages would decline. Of course, exactly the opposite happened after that because we wouldnt in the midst of the industrialization and globalization and the transition from a society where unionization, we could earn a middle income with just a High School Diploma to the world were were living to know where you certainly cannot. The only way you can have a fighting chance in the American Economy is that some kind postsecondary credential and the only organizations allowed to issue those credentials are the only organizations allowed to access public subsidies our colleges and universities as weve known them for a long time. So i feel that the flaws have been there for a long time but the consequences and the stakes are much higher now than ever before. Those internal contradictions that really waited at the tensions and the culture of the university against the core mission of undergraduate learning which is borne out in most of the research we have around how much students learn in college i think probably a lot of us are for my with very interesting work of sociology, academically adrift they came out a few years ago. The newest members of the oecd that compare the sort of just foundational math and reading skills of the average American College graduate to the average College Graduate in other countries including other countries the graduate more people who college, not less. Confined to the average American College graduate doesnt look very good compared to his or her peers in other countries. All that i would argue is at root, a function of the confusion and the confusion that causes institutions do not take their Central Mission to provide record incoherence and attention to the undergraduate educational mention nation as citizens as they are to practices or Information Technology intersects with these longterm trends, and the rest of it is talk about how things have changed, how there are all kinds of things that are possible now that were not possible even a few years ago. I acknowledge that by talking about this i join along and kind of a global roster of people who were predicted that every new kind of Information Technology would surely overthrow the college as we know to Thomas Edison high schools would become obsolete because which a students movies long time ago if they turn out not to be right. But i believe fundamentally that this time is different and i think that kind of Information Technology environment we are in now is very, very different from when the best we could do is have college on the radio or college over Cable Television that the nature of interactivity interactivity, the computational power, the ability to great authentic human communities in a commendation of a virtual space and a real space is much much different than it used to be. So we both had the opportunity to create learning environments that are actually substantially better than some of the learning environments that Students Experience now. And ill sort of possible Remote Energy everyone as we talk about paused for a moment the nature of learning to keep in mind the large distinction between the consensus the of the best learning environment is and what the learning environment the most College Students actually experience in most of our institutions. I would argue there is a large distance between the two of them. Taperecorded think about whats possible in the future, we cant say, well this, that or the other vision of technology could never become as my memory of my one great class i had in college. Because we cant remember the one great class we had in college and we tend to not remember that very many not memorable educational experience as we had an often as much more the latter than the former. The other thing we think about is just the basic issue of how not only can we do better in some cases can we can do the same for many more people for a lot less money. Thats important that we cannot ignore the economics of Higher Education in all of this. As part of the book i took a word i think of when became so tired of hearing a few years ago, something that went to the kind of classic cycle of overpraised in the disappointment but which nonetheless i believe represents a very, very important and Ongoing Development in american Higher Education. Mostly its a narrative device if you read the book, and i hope you will. I took an entire mit genetics class. I dont represent my learning extremes as representative of anything other than myself. Learners are different in many many different ways. What i think is noteworthy about the fact that i took this mit genetics class is that one thing im sure of is that my experience was in no importantly different than the experience of the students who were taking the same class in cambridge, massachusetts. Its a very kind of straightforward approach that they use for the introductory classes at mit which is of course one of many approaches but not exactly an uncommon one. It was a lecture base class. I think weve all sort of in some ways learned to denigrate the lecture as kind of bad ecology, but to go to lectures can be really good. This was a lecture that was taught by a man named eric lander of the lead the human genome project in the 1990s. Hes been teaching the introductory biology which is essential introductory to genetics. Is as uptodate in the field as is possible to be. Changes to class every year because genetics changes of you. On cambridge massachusetts, 100 students took real freshman. They take all of the lectures and then two weeks later tens of thousands of people around the world including myself watched the same lectures, did exactly the same problems that come the same homework assignment, took the exact same exams. I went up to cambridge to see the class in person. I was curious. Is there something im missing by not being there . I interviewed a bunch of the students afterwards to kind of get a sense of how they took the class. I interviewed eric lander. I want to be sure i was right about this and what that although there was the same thing. They said this class, i went to the lectures. I went back, i talked to some of my fellow students which i could easily do in the online forums. I worked very very hard on the problem sets which is at the core of an experience in that kind of introductory science class. And i took the exams. Thats how they teach the class at mit, and you can replicate that essentially perfectly at a marginal cost to the last student of nothing. Probably cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars to produce the class quoteunquote. They put it out there and now anyone can take it for free. The combination i think of the fact that we can reach so many more people for so much less money, and in certain elements but certain important elements of Higher Education, the fact that the reach of Information Technology continues to expand the fact that we can predict confidently that these four people in places like stanford and Carnegie Mellon have been trying very hard to put together neuroscience and cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence into really serious attempts to make the experience of learning any Technology Enabled environment much much more than what i did which was just watched lecture videos and solve problems. We can predict with confidence that certain kinds of trends are going to continue in certain kind of direction. For people of access to better technology. Our use of Technology Education we will continue to improve. The genie is out of the bottle in terms of the best quoteunquote our most prestigious is probably more accurate American Colleges and universities putting their good name behind these kinds of educational experiences. When you put that together, thats coming up with all those things together and thats what produces what i characterize and about as the university of everywhere. Heres what i mean by that specifically. I have a daughter, four and a half, about to turn five. The question and they make me wonder what the book what will college be like when she turns 18 . Will be pretty much the same when i turn 18 or will be something substantially different . I in the and cam on the side of substantially different. If she was turning 18 today she wouldve two options. She could go to a Traditional College or university or she could engage in some kind of mostly purely online version of that it wouldnt be as good. So she would go to the traditional one and i was been whatever amount of money my wife and i put together, if we were typical borrow a bunch more money and she would go. 15 years from now when she goes to college is what i think will be different. I think shell still have the option of going to a Traditional Institutions, many of which were frankly still trying to charge even more money and compete viciously with one another for the very last full pay students out there, whatever he or she has. Out of state overseas, somewhere. Ionian want to say online because i think our sense of what online means is going to change quite a lot. You cant assume that nature of interacting with technology 20 years from now is going to be like this thing that we do know, going to be an act as humans with machines will evolve over time in ways that would be more human, not less as we go forward. And then i think we now have the opportunity to create, this is the thing im in many ways most excited about new Higher Learning organizations that provide all of the hugely important yet not quite specific and tangible benefits of belonging to the and authentic learning human community. People will still want to leave home and go somewhere, have what i had as a suny student live among other people my age, have coming of age experiences go out on weekends, learned some things, fall in love. All those people so what do all those things, but you can create places that provide that experience and take advantage of both pedagogically and economically of the immense wealth of Educational Resources that will be available via technology, and put them together into an organization that i think will be both more effective and a lot less expensive. You are not going to have to pay the increasingly high toll for admission to these walled gardens of learning that weve erected over the last couple of centuries to get a quote College Education. In many ways the traditional model is fundamentally a product of scarcity. If you want to get a good College Education you needed access to three things. You need to beware the other students were, you needed to be when Critical Mass of scholars and mentors and teachers work, if you need to be someplace i could afford to take advantage of the best Information Technology of the time comes which was the printed book. All those things cost a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to build a place where you can against his people, a lot of money to buy other books worth reading, and i think because that had to be scarce weve all kind of willingly or unwillingly internalized this idea of scarcity in Higher Education and thus this notion we should judge colleges by how many people they dont lead them. We are right now in the middle of making a very profound transformation from a time of scarcity to a time of abundance and Education Resources and i really do think that will change fundamentally the kinds of educational organizations that are possible and that will become over this time. Not just here in the United States but around the world. Probably the most single most important thing that has happened on planet earth over the last 40 years is the declining global poverty. In 1980, 52 of all the people on earth were below the poverty line of 1. 25 1. 25 a the. That number is now down around 20 even as the population grew to 7 billion people. The kind of middleground estimate is between now and 2030, 3 billion people will join the global middle class. Thats more people than its ever been to college in all of Human History and the first thing you want for your children once you can provide safety and health care and food and shelter is education. We cannot educate those 3 billion people by building millions of americanstyle colleges and universities. We cannot afford to do that here in the richest nation on earth. So its not just going to come the university of everywhere is going to be in our own society. I think in many ways it will be these fantastically growing and dynamic developing societies that will that even ask themselves some of these questions about what we do with the old institutions and had we changed them. Able to write to the new as fast as they can. Thats going to be a reality that we can take advantage of but we also need to beware because they will not wait for us to resolve the argument weve been having around Higher Learning system for a long time. Im very optimistic. I think this is an opportunity for american Higher Education institutions which are the unchallenged leaders in Global Learning to be the leaders in Global Learning in the future. But we are going to look outward, not inward. Will have to have a much broader sense of possibility about what a college or university can be and ought to be and is obliged to be given the world we live in. And i think it can happen and to contaminate from our public institutions. I fundamentally believe that in a public purpose and public good of Higher Education, but we need for institutiinstituti ons and we need better institutions and we need institutions that are much less confused than they have been. So i really appreciate you taking time to listen and looking forward to talking with my fellow panelists. [applause] thank you very much, kevin. That was a great start to our delight the call of our panelists. Well, i guess i will start from up here. As you can see kevin has been joined by four panelists. But we are very fortunate to have been to each comes from quite a different background and works everyday the kind of institution which i thought would be a useful way to get some different responses to what kevin has to say