Education and Entertainment Merge in One Whimsical View of Colleges' Future

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

By JEFF SELINGO
Honolulu
Predicting the future is an inexact science, of course. Just ask the creators of The Jetsons. After all, our workdays still don't consist of pushing a single computer button as they did for George Jetson.
Even so, Richard N. Katz, vice president of Educause, took a crack at forecasting the future of higher education with a whimsical video he showed here at the "Campus of the Future" conference. Among other things, the video, titled edu@2020, made the following tongue-in-cheek predictions for the coming years:

2008
The Apollo Group sells the University of Phoenix Online to Google, which creates GooglePhoenix.

Microsoft takes over Pearson Education and Blackboard.

Michael S. Ovitz, the former Hollywood talent agent, starts FacultyOne, a talent agency for star professors, and immediately signs up 13 Nobel laureates.

2009
Disney, Sony, and Apple merge.

Disney acquires struggling colleges, promising to invigorate them with "Disney magic -- entertaining while they educate."

2012
MIT leads a partnership with other universities to "open source" their curricula to the masses.

In response, Harvard, Princeton, and other Ivy League universities start a competitor -- VirtualIvy.

2017
Disney and Britain's Open University form a partnership that delivers the university's curriculum on Sony PlayStation.

Google introduces software that allows students to generate artificial instructors based on their preferences.

It is soon followed by Sim Student, which allows students to create peers to go along with their artificial instructors.

2020
Google, Disney, and Microsoft compete for a worldwide learning market.

All the colleges that existed in 2006 have standardized their curricula under regulatory and competitive pressures, while struggling colleges have been turned into "educational theme parks."

Access to higher education is nearly universal and less expensive than it was in 2006.

Course credits transfer easily because they all come from one of a dozen common curricula.

After the presentation, the moderator, James Dator, director of the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies and a professor of political science at the University Hawaii-Manoa, quipped to the audience: "There you have it. I'd suggest you just head to the beach now."
Later on, Mr. Katz did admit to the limitations of his predictions, noting that forecasting is generally wrong in two ways. For one, it is usually too enthusiastic. In other words, predicted events, if they occur, probably will be further into the future than imagined. Also, predictions tend to "undershoot the mark in terms of change."
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education