Newspapers, Universities and the Internet
February 27, 2010
Newspapers and universities are in the same business. They are in information logistics; they are in the research, creation and transfer of information. The Internet now threatens both institutions. The writing on the wall is already very clear for the newspaper business, but not yet for the universities.
Newspapers have been the logistics channel for journalism. But newspapers have been just as much in the print advertising business, as they have been in the business of selling content written by journalists. On the ad side, newspapers have enjoyed a more or less local monopoly over the market. That money is now gone. It is lost to Google.
Universities have been the logistics channel for education. As of today, there’s no Google destroying that. Instead of having monopolies over advertising, universities have enjoyed barriers to competition in the form of local language and accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to blog or to tweet. Not anyone can sell recognized degrees. But the number of people who associate being informed and learning with following experts they recognize on the Internet is soon reaching hundreds of millions. More and more people think that the most valuable learning takes place in bite-sized chunks, every day, through reading the contributions of people we recognize as being worth following.
We know that degrees don’t signal competence and thus they have less and less true human capital value. However, learning, as a way of life, without beginnings and ends, is becoming more and more valuable.
Leading institutions like Stanford University and MIT are giving lectures on the Internet. Apple iTunes is aggregating those and hundreds more like them into playlists, which may be the new way to see course architectures. The way peer learners have experienced their unique combination of these learning playlists may be the most valuable starting point for any individual learning path. Is the Amazon recommendation system then the way classes should be filled? Is iTunes the Google challenge for universities?
People will argue that the best university courses are superior to any online offering, and they are often right. There is no substitute for a live meeting of minds. But that’s far from the experience of the student sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she’s getting is a live version of what iTunes offers, without the ability to participate, to rate, discuss with peers, rewind, bookmark, return to later and forward to others.
People in the traditional print media have dismissed online writing because of its low average quality. The average quality of the writing online isn’t what the print media are competing against. They’re competing against the best writing online. And often, they’re losing. This is what is going to happen next with teaching. Universities are going to compete against the best bloggers and the very best aggregators of learning content. The sad truth, both when it comes to the newspapers and to the universities, is that if you are used to being a monopoly, you create habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly face competition. The Internet is now transforming the consumption habits of newspaper customers. There is an even bigger change happening in the learning related habits of people. Hopefully, the universities won’t fight as much against their customers’ new habits as the newspapers do!
Thank you Riel Miller. Based on Kevin Carey. Mimi Ito and Paul Graham
8 Responses to “Newspapers, Universities and the Internet”
February 28, 2010 at 12:37
Esko,
It is true that many universities can be seen as “logistics” channels by analyzing the measured output of university “learning” and academic studies on employment, success in life after the degrees have been given out and impact on the society in general.
The change brought by the new competition will have a drastic impact on the:
- number of university institutions, less is more (which is good)
- public perception on the role of universities (which is an opportunity)
- expectations on the quality of formal educations (which is a deal-breaker).
University degrees have been (until now) a way for anyone with enough “sitting muscles” to achieve something in life. We have been brought up to believe hard academic work pays off. Very seldom in financial terms but still an important driver to many.
Hopefully in the future a person can create a life-long learning path by combining formal education with “online” elements and proof of real participation. The challenge we still face is that creating something unique still takes as much effort as “sitting in class” and too many people take the easy way to engage into copy-paste on-line academics in different channels.
Tagging is not enough. We need more intelligent and unique sources in the on-line channels.
Thank you for the food for though. Let’s hope some of the winners in the game are academic institutions who gave Us an education. Or maybe it really is time for new players to fill the “logistics” channel in learning.
Kr,
markku
March 3, 2010 at 17:36
There are two other aspects to universities besides the ones you mentioned: Today the leading Universities are de facto 1) powerful mixed economies with a huge public and private fundraising clout on one side and an high output of IP-assets on the other site. 2) institutionalized networks of mentor-peer and peer-to-peer relations that form a socialisation engine into many “hard to enter” domains….
March 3, 2010 at 20:39
I fully agree. My main question here is whether we need an aggregating channel for (1) and (2), or is a transparent network and emergent self-organizing enough to achieve the same result.
March 12, 2010 at 04:59
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March 19, 2010 at 14:34
I’m not sure about universities being a monopoly. They may form a closed “club” and discourage new competitors, but they still compete with each other, at least in Finland. Both universities and polytechnics compete on their students (which affects their funding), so at least some of them are innovating and moving forward, not resting on their laurels.
And in the end, as the cost of bits goes asymptotically towards zero, the value of learning resources (including blog articles, OERs etc.) by themselves will also approach zero. What will have value are the services around those contents. So in the case of educational institutions, the lecture material and such will lose value, but the related services, such as personal tutoring, customized learning paths, and of course the official degree, will have value also in the future. Although the importance of an official degree may suffer (except maybe for medical doctors
.
April 4, 2010 at 23:34
If universities are smart, they will learn a valuable lesson from the deplorable mess in media today. Newsrooms have downsized to the point where some newspaper companies can hardly make a case to attract subscribers … or advertisers.
The problem newspapers faced was simple: they ignored innovation. Media decision-makers closed the doors of the boardrooms and failed to listen as innovators began creating community platforms funded by angels and venture capitalists outside of the media industry.
Eventually, media adopted these platforms as useful means of disseminating content and reaching the masses. But the advertising revenue belonged to the inventors of the community platform, not the content producers.
Imagine that.
The same thing is occurring with universities. Although university websites have a psuedo-monopoly, they typically lose out to Facebook, MySpace and Ning, which understand all too well that the most valued commodity online is community. And this year Facebook will own 25% of the worldwide social networking advertising market, which is roughly $2 billion. And Facebook is still in kindergarten at age 6. It’s got a lot of room to grow.
There are indeed creative individuals seeking to help universities utilize online innovations. I’m one of them. But if universities don’t open the doors of the boardrooms to let in the fresh air of innovation, they will find themselves left in the stale stagnant smoke of obsolescence, commiserating with defunct print news media.
April 4, 2010 at 23:49
Thank you! Newspapers also ignored the drastic increase of new (news and information) supply, changing the earlier balance between demand and supply. The same thing is happening now in education. You might enjoy this: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
April 5, 2010 at 04:51
Shirky’s commentary is poignant and insightful. Thank you for the link.
I’d like to add, that while complex systems, companies and bureaucracies produce layers of complexities to the point of inefficiency, inflexibility and eventual collapse, the new model for giants like Google and Microsoft seems to be to purchase smaller, simpler innovations and build them into giant complex units … then do it again.
That model isn’t necessarily sustainable, but it does do a couple of things in the meantime:
1. It creates giant corporations that continually evolve by purchasing smaller innovators and potential competitors.
2. It provides new money to innovators who sell their inventions. And they, in turn, create something else to sell.
Perhaps there’s more to the model, but from my vantage point, that’s how it looks. Google is too big for any small shop to compete with. And it’s easier to sell and use the money to fund more ideas, which creates a defacto crowdsourcing innovation division for giant corporations. And that enables everyone to survive … as long as the little guys keep feeding the big guys.