This weekend I was struck by an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle (SFC) about the plan by the University of California (UC) to conduct an online learning pilot program. The title of the editorial says it all: "On UC's Risky Venture Into Online Education: Mortarboards without the bricks." A companion piece by the sponsor of the program, Christopher Edley, Dean of the UC Berkeley (UCB) School of Law laid out the rationale for the initiative.

The debate is fascinating and, in a phrase, seems like "deja vu all over again," reminscent of the arguments I hear being made about cloud computing all the time. I will explain, but first let me note why I feel qualified to voice an opinion in this:

1. I am a consumer of public education services, as my sons attend a local school and through them I see how technology is commonly used in education settings (albeit at the elementary education level).
2. One of our clients is the Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF), which seeks to improve K-12 educational outcomes in the local region. We migrated one of SVEF's applications to AWS with a lot of success. You can download a whitepaper on the project, complete with TCO information, here (registration required). Of interesting note is that SVEF, as a result of the successful project we assisted them with, has migrated all of their applications to the cloud -- a common pattern with clients, who, once they realize the benefits of cloud computing, tend to "rinse and repeat."
3. Last December I keynoted the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) executive retreat and spoke on cloud computing (EDUCAUSE is the higher education IT organization). I learned an enormous amount about how technology is applied within a higher education setting along with the enormous pressure higher education is under with respect to funding. Simply put, colleges and universities face a funding crisis unprecedented since the growth of "big education" that started in the fifties.

The SFC editorial did not overtly state a conclusion from its treatment of the topic, but anyone who read it would understand that the paper was recommending a retreat from the concept. The editorial trotted out a number of reasons that would imply the initiative is doomed:

• Online education can't replace the face-to-face real thing. The online degree wouldn't have the same status as the "real" one, so employers would be skeptical about an applicant with an online degree.
• Research shows that middle school users of computers perform worse on standardized tests in reading and math. And besides, other research shows that we learn differently -- "less comprehensively and more distractedly" -- when learning online. I note that in-person education did not prevent the editorial writer from using a clunker of a phrase: more distractedly. What's up with that? Couldn't he or she come up with a more felicitous wording? But I digress.
• It will cost a lot to put courses online and there will be support and maintenance costs besides. UC plans to charge the same as in-person courses and the question is: "will students pay?" UC could end up losing a lot of money in this intiative.

As one might expect, I disagree almost entirely with the editorial. I applaud the UC initiative; my only criticism is that it's not imaginative enough. Let's look at the initiative from a different perspective:

• While face-to-face teaching is undoubtedly powerful, the question is whether it's sustainable. As I noted earlier, colleges and universities face an unprecedented funding crisis. Insisting that things continue in the old way because it's the best reflects a refusal to confront facts on the ground. This is especially true for UC, which is hostage to the overall California State budget; this is clearly a nightmare that's going to play out over the next decade and the UC system will to face cuts that will proscribe business as usual.
• Glibly citing research studies of dubious direct applicability is not convincing. What's being talked about is online teaching, not general use of the Internet. And, "more distractedly" notwithstanding, there are certainly many, many examples of people focusing intently on online activities that look a lot like education.
• The question of what to charge for the education is an intriguing one. But charging the same as for face-to-face education is a decision, not a requirement. And the issue of whether an online degree would be respected as much as a bricks-and-mortar one is also intriguing. I'll come back to both of those issues in a moment.

A good way to think about a new development is to examine the incumbent environment as it were the new development. That provides a framework to think about the efficacy of the new development absent the baggage of assumptions carried with the incumbent.

So think about a college program as if it were being invented today. You are bringing together a world-class set of experts (faculty) and want to share their knowledge and, more crucially, their problem-solving ability, with people. Would you sequester the faculty in a set of extremely expensive buildings that you can't really afford, and require students who want to learn the material to relocate just so they could physically interact with the faculty -- with no opportunity to interact remotely? Would you require a mode of education better suited to the nineteenth (or indeed, the fourteenth) century rather than one that integrates with current technology?

Or would you design a program to enable an audience of the most capable students to leverage distributed technology to inexpensively interact with the faculty from the convenience of wherever the students happen to be located? Wouldn't you use occasional face-to-face interactions to enable rich personal relationships in inexpensive settings like rented offices, public libraries, and the like? Wouldn't you try and figure out how to distribute a very scarce resource (faculty) the most efficient way possible?

The answer is obvious. Your design would incorporate cheap connectivity, purpose-designed and economically efficient physical interaction environments, and, yes, cloud computing, to create an education approach appropriate to today's capabilities -- rather than shrilly insist that whatever solution is come up with, it has to implement an expensive, inconvenient, and exclusionary framework. In short, you'd infuse the offering with technology instead of using technology as I've seen it used: as a bolt-on addition implemented in a manner that reinforces the status quo and hinders the power of technology.

Really, the path forward is not in question. The ever-increasing success of the commercial offerings like the Universit of Phoenix indicate that the new mode of education is gaining momentum. The real question is when the new mode will break out of the lowly, non-Ivy League category.

Here are some thoughts about what UC should do:

It should move forward as fast as possible with its pilot initiative. It desperately needs to find a more cost-effective way to deliver education. Can anyone seriously think that bits are more expensive than bricks?

It should reconsider its financial assumptions regarding pricing. As this figure indicates, one of the benefits of digital distribution is that a far larger audience can consume content when not constrained by physical presence (that is, after all, the fundamental problem the recorded music industry is facing). Instead of planning for the same size student population at the same prices, why not lower prices and increase the number of students?

As any professor of economics (e.g., one of the three Nobel laureates in economics that currently teach at UCB) will tell you, price elasticity indicates that reduced prices increase demand and can increase total realized revenue, which in the context of UC means that it could charge less per student and actually increase its overall budget. And larger numbers of students would be possible, remember, because you'd design the program from the ground up to leverage online learning, making it possible to manage larger student populations. Imagine the power of UC if two or three times as many really good UC graduates move into the workplace.

It should consider leveraging the strengths of remote learning to create innovative course and degree programs. The different campuses should collaborate on joint offerings, which are much easier when nobody has to travel hundreds of miles to present a combined course. For sure, I'd like to see my undergraduate campus (UC Santa Cruz) take an active part in the initiative. UCSC has always had an idiosyncratic approach to things, and its embrace of the innovative makes it a natural candidate for the initiative.

UC should consider becoming the first prestige university to pursue an online program, thereby enabling it to dominate the category. One of the pecularities of mass connectivity is that it tends to converge on dominant solutions due to ease of access and reduced search costs. The initial prestige university that goes online full bore will have a first mover advantage that will be difficult to displace.

It's a cliche (or, rather, an established academic theory, developed by Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School) that successful incumbents in an industry never lead the charge to disrupt their industry. The most successful prestige universities (Harvard, Yale, et al) are unlikely to adopt an online-forward strategy; they see it as interesting but unnecessary. UCB is in the unique (and admirable) position of being both a prestige university and having to do something. Its budgetary woes simply won't support business as usual. UCB should respond to this situation as an opportunity to move to, as another cliche goes, "where the puck is going to be."

I see the primary barrier to this strategy as the real beneficiaries of higher education -- who are not the students. The real beneficiaries of higher education at prestige institutions are the faculty. A move to online education would disrupt a comfortable and comforting traditional employment arrangement in favor of responding to tomorrow's workplace, which is bound to be disquieting.

Predicably, the SFC ran a forum piece written by two UCB faculty members, being "joined in this view" by four other members, maintaining that "UC must put emphasis on education, not brand." Essentially, the argument can be characterized as "something might go wrong, so we should just keep things the way they are." I, too, would prefer to keep a cozy mode of employment in the face of discomfort.

One wonders whether the faculty authors of the forum piece, along with their "joiners," will feel the same when their positions are being axed due to the budget crunch. I wouldn't care to shield myself with tenure when the posed alternative is laying off Highway Patrol officers. That's a losing strategy. To paraphase Dr. Johnson, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be laid off in a fortnight, it makes remote teaching look much more attractive."

Really, there's a rich irony in the SFC profferring advice to UC about how to respond to digital learning. It's not that long ago that the SFC, faced with terrible losses (brought on by its profligate borrowing for an LBO) was reduced to threatening its employees with closure of the newpaper if wage givebacks weren't accepted (I wrote about the SFC's self-inflicted predicament here). It's akin to buggywhip manufacturers advising the train industry about how to respond to airlines.

Frankly, I am impressed -- even astonished -- that UC is taking such an visionary approach to online learning. While there have been many initiatives about making faculty lectures available for download (this is referred to as "Open Content"), they have not been very successful. In my view this is because the value of the content is not married to the value of accomplishment, i.e., consumption leading to the recognition of a degree. UC is looking to take the next logical step, which is to extend content distribution to education distribution. UC should be applauded and supported in this. If it would like to tap our experience and knowledge based on our education work with SVEF, we would be honored to participate.

• Bernard Golden's blog
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