WICHE recently put together an infographic that provides quick overviews of distance education enrollment patterns, based on IPEDS Fall 2013 survey data that might challenge popular opinion:

• Public students primarily attend distance education institutions in their home state.
• For-profit students primarily attend distance education institutions in other states
• Distance education growth from 2012 to 2013 varied greatly by higher ed sector, and the growth occurred despite overall higher education enrollments decreasing by 4%.
• The number of institutions serving students outside their state and outside the US is growing.
• More than 2/3rrd’s of full distance students enroll in public or nonprofit colleges
• One in eight students took ALL their courses through distance delivery
• One in four students took at least 1 distance course.

See the infographic at:

http://wcet.wiche.edu/learn/busting-the-myth-distance-education

On May 19th:  The Great Recession and its aftermath have exposed a major mismatch between the skills of many college graduates and the skills employers are seeing.  If anything, as technological change marches on, this problem may get worse.

University presidents and trustees cannot afford to be complacent. One compelling suggestion, by Monica Herk, the Committee for Economic Development’s vice president for education research, is that all institutions of higher learning focus far more on certifying competencies in particular skills that employers demand rather than on simply requiring students to complete a fixed number of classes. This may even lead to an unbundling of courses and certifications, much as the challengers to cable-television providers are now beginning to offer consumers. (Full disclosure: I am a member of CED’s research advisory board).

Key to making this new, potentially more cost-effective educational system work, Ms. Herk points out, is the availability and widespread use of various kinds of assessments – not necessarily all standardized tests — that can certify to employers that individuals have certain competencies.

The Collegiate Learning Assessment, which attempts to measure how much college students have learned from the beginning of their freshman year to sometime during their senior year, is one such tool that some 700 schools are now using. But there is plenty of room in the marketplace for many other types of specialized assessments.

Development of such tools should be, and maybe already are, a high research priority both in academe and in industry. Once some are validated by employers as reliable indicators of future work performance – and, with hope, better than the SAT is of college performance — the education market finally should be disrupted. Employers will demonstrate demand for workers with certified skills, however they are gained, and a highly competitive market among educational institutions of all types will lead to programs that help students of all ages gain those certifications more cost-effectively than is the case now.

Education will never be the same: unbundled, less costly and more effective.

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On June 2, 2015:  Stripes Group led a $65 million Series D Investment in Udemy Inc. to help the startup grow its online marketplace for education.  Instructors on Udemy can create, promote and sell interactive courses to “lifelong learners” who browse, pay for and take the courses there “on demand”.

Udemy CEO Dennis Yang regards his 160-employee company as education’s answer to Netflix, or a kind of next-generation Pearson, the education publishing juggernaut. The San Francisco startup competes with other “edtech” platforms such as Pluralsight, Khan Academy, Coursera and Curious.com.

With 160 employees and offices in San Francisco, Dublin and Ankara, Turkey, Udemy currently offers more than 30,000 different courses in 80 different languages. The courses are not for college credit and the company does not have plans to offer degrees, Mr. Yang said. Subjects range from yoga, music and foreign languages, to coding, marketing and graphic design. Courses typically cost about $25, though some are available for free.

Stripes Group Managing Partner Ken Fox said he believes the company is on track for an initial public offering. The investor also said, “There’s not a real category leader here yet,” and Udemy’s main competition is “apathy” or “the self-help section on Amazon.”

The company intends to use the capital to make its offering better known among prospective teachers and students alike, and to ramp up the number of courses and features that the platform offers, especially to its international users.