Fast Company Magazine Sept. 2009 issue - Who Needs Harvard?

Very provocative article, for working folk seeking new educational pathways even as they hit the commute at o-dark-thirty. Still on the newsstands for a couple more days, even as August seems to make time stand still for an instant.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html

This excerpt sums it up:
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... [H]igher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."

The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.

The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

Wiley doesn't come off immediately as a bomb thrower. He is a 37-year-old member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with five kids. He has close-cropped gray hair, glasses, and speaks softly in a West Virginia accent. But he employs his niceness strategically, as a general in the intellectual vanguard of the transformation of higher education. The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.

. . .

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Sounds like Clayton Christensen's "disruptive technology" applied to the university enterprise, doesn't it...?

Also see http://www.claytonchristensen.com/#book_disrupting for Dr. Christensen's recent book on this new trend.