The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

For example, among BYU-Idaho's most watched statistics is the percentage of students admitted, rather than the percentage denied.

Adjunct instructors give the online educators two other advantages. Rather than receiving an annual salary, as full-time faculty at traditional universities do, online instructors are paid by the course.

Harvard succeeded in becoming Harvard in large part because it never tried to become anything else.

BYU-Idaho determined to serve only undergraduates, with the goal of providing even ordinary students a first-class education via a focused set of academic offerings.

Our challenge today is radical reformation. Change at the margins will not do. The choice, it seems to me, is this: Reinvention or extinction.

One is growth in the number of would-be consumers who cannot afford the continuously enhanced offerings and thus become nonconsumers.

Another reason for the lack of disruption in higher education has been the absence of a disruptive technology. Since the time that universities first gathered students into classrooms, the learning technologies—lectures, textbooks, oral and written examinations—have remained largely the same.

He introduced himself to faculty members as “a teacher who is now working as a president, not a president who used to be a teacher.”1

The other is the emergence of technologies that will, in the right hands, allow new competitors to serve this disenfranchised group of nonconsumers, as shown in Figure 1.2.