“The pending closure is credit negative for a small subset of the higher-education sector with similar attributes to Saint Paul’s and other closed colleges: very small, private colleges with a high reliance on student charges, indistinct market positions, and limited donor support,” Moody’s analysts said. “We anticipate more closures for these types of colleges given the current pressures on all higher-education revenue sources and increased accreditation scrutiny.”

“Everywhere I turned I came across industry members who are way too focused on current channels and products. They’re happy that 20-30% of their revenues are coming from “digital”; of course, by “digital” they mean quick-and-dirty print-to-e conversions, print-under-glass, or any one of a number of other descriptions of today’s ebook marketplace. Many of them will tell you privately that “the ebook revolution” was overblown, they’ve wasted way too many resources on speculative e-projects and now see no reason to throw more good money after bad on this front. The Digital Discovery Zone was a quaint little area set off by green carpeting and featuring about a dozen of the usual suspects, many of which are sponsors of the various industry conferences. It felt like walking through a petting zoo at your local state fair. I half expected someone to say, “wash your hands if you touch one of those animals, honey, you don’t want to spread any germs.” Isn’t it amazing that we still separate the “digital” players from the rest of the exhibitors at a major trade show?”

“Online education strips away all of those expenses except for the cost of the professor’s time and experience. It sounds perfect, an alignment of technology, social need and limited resources. So why do so many people believe that it is a deeply flawed solution? Because it means massive swaths of higher education is about to change. Technology has disrupted many industries; now it’s about to do the same to higher ed.”

“As an example, the Michigan Tech paper describes an item known as a “parametric automated filter wheel changer.” The item would cost about $2,500 from a commercial vendor but could be made with a 3-D printer for less than $100. It’s essentially a plastic wheel that holds colored filters in place as they rotate, testing the effects of the varying colors on the number of electrons that are emitted for each photon fired into a solar cell, Mr. Pearce said. “It was $2,500,” he said, “and all it does is move the filter around.”

“Something that is more appealing to consumers is offered that makes the older product obsolete. But this time, I am that older product. So I ask myself, will society as a whole be better off as a result? I know what the economics textbooks say, and I know what I have always told my students. But it is a lot easier to believe in a theory when it is about the world in general, rather than about your world in particular.”

“You know, Harvard Business School doesn’t teach accounting anymore, because there’s a guy out of BYU whose online accounting course is so good. He is extraordinary, and our accounting faculty, on average, is average. Some [universities] will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person.”

“Perhaps most disruptive of all, the University of Wisconsin is offering a fully legitimate college degree without any class time required. So long as students can pass some tests (and pay the associated costs), they can learn from anywhere in the world. To give readers a sense of how abrupt this change is, online education pioneer and founder of the YouTube-based learning website Khan Academy, Sal Khan, opined about a test-based college degree at Aspen Institute’s big-think Ideas Festival two years ago. No one, even those on the cutting edge of digital education, considered that they were talking about the very near future.”

“No industry has ever organized an orderly sharing of power with newcomers, no matter how interesting or valuable their ideas are, unless under mortal threat.”

“… although journalists, many of them really are mission-driven, they’re not the only people who have driven them into their professions. Physicians, many of them, are mission-driven. What happens in their case is that technology allows nurses to provide more and more high quality care. The instinct of the physicians is to look down their noses at the nurses, and say, “They’re not as good as we are.” And they feel like their mission is compromised by handing off care to “less quality” care providers. And teachers feel the same way. So it’s not unique, but I think in each case, the reaction of the leaders in the industry is to justify the need why they shouldn’t change, and everybody else is wrong. And you keep changing the definition of quality to justify why you don’t need to be worried. I think that that’s probably what’s going on.”

“Most early stage products overshoot eventual customer needs that emerge over time, he said, so entrepreneurs and developers should instead design for the mainstream — not the ideal consumer or use cases. Only by touching the customer and interacting with them and studying their problems will design and product development be optimized. “Products that aren’t the best, but are affordable and usable, disrupt markets,” Christensen told the BoxWorks audience.”