What is the value of a higher education?

What does value migration look like in higher education?

• In other words: What will constitute the high/medium/lower range? How will universities deliver more value in 5, 10, & 15 years? How will education be different? What opportunities to add value exist now that can be capitalized, utilized, and optimized? How will in class experiences, assignments, feedback, teaching, and online integration be different and better? In other words, how will professors deliver value perhaps differently in the future than they have in the past? How will the university deliver value? What might be the end goal of the classroom experience? For definitional purposes (note I contextually defined it with the 6th question and arguably the 7th): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_migration Notice: answering any of the above questions constitutes a legitimate answer to the question. Very important update: The answer could be about learning science & feedback & re-focusing on different skills & different types of activities & assessment.  It doesn't have to be about technology.

• Answer:

  I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer this for "higher education," but I can definitely take a crack at it for Public High Schools in the US. Value Migration as a business model is obviously a bit different in education- especially in public education.  We're not really about change business models for an increased profit. We do however, look at what we deliver to students in terms of meeting what we can forecast as being their needs as they leave for university or the workplace. The OP focuses a good deal on how classrooms will change.  I would suggest that we are already seeing the beginnings of such a value migration in the public education sector. Methodologies such as the "flipped classroom," online textbooks or ebooks, the movement away from "classic" research databases, distance learning, availability of global research data (or even research data from space!), increased collaboration with universities, etc., have taken root and changed what a typical high school classroom looks like. Just this week, I was working with one of my science teachers as they were working on PCR in a high school biology class- this would have been unheard of just a few years ago when gel electrophoresis was still confined to research labs!  Work that was at one time the domain of research scientists is now performed by lab techs. It is our job as educators to try to at least keep up with the curve of change (even if it is impossible to stay on top of it).