(from RealClearEducation) For people in higher education, the news that Purdue University, Indiana’s public land-grant university, will buy Kaplan University, an online for-profit school, was an earthquake whose tremors may reverberate for years to come. A Purdue-affiliated online operation such as Kaplan could attract a lot of students, and the competition could force changes on campus at Purdue and elsewhere.
Alana Dunagan, a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute and a champion of change-inducing technologies, sees great potential for the merger. “Part of the beauty of what Purdue has done is structuring the new school as an autonomous unit. Too often, online education is what we call a ‘hybrid’ innovation—using a new technology but really packaging it in the old business model at the exact same cost, with requirements and structure just the same, not taking advantage of the cost structure or the pedagogical improvements possible.”
Read the full article at RealClearEducation.com.
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