Developing the Educational Widget - undergraduate courses

In a very insightful interview, Kevin Carey provides a glimpse of several attempts in the direction of innovation in higher education by a private sector, for-profit company.  I'm not talking about publishers or software vendors, the interests of whom are not likely to demand innovation anytime soon. No, this is a genuine attempt to develop an education widget (I use the term with some affection) - the undergraduate course.  As difficult as it is for us to admit, the delivery of undergraduate courses is, more a required component of university campus practices than it is a demonstrably effective method of teaching and learning.  Is it possible, therefore, to build the widgets and sell them online to a group of students who willingly and knowingly buy them?

I recommend the whole article, but these two concluding statements caught my attention.

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly

Which means the day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things—vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research—will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too—vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts. Rather than hiding within the conglomerate, each unbundled part of the university will have to find new ways to stand alone. There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.