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

The University of Phoenix, for example, recognized revenues of $2.5 billion in 2007; by the end of 2009 that figure had risen to nearly $3.8 billion.13 In that year it enrolled 355,800 new students, roughly 150,000 more than the total enrollment of the ten campuses of the University of California.14

Changing direction requires…leadership that views the university idealistically, as something more than a business and something better than a slave to the logic of economic competition.9

A disruptive innovation, by contrast, disrupts the bigger-and-better cycle by bringing to market a product or service that is not as good as the best traditional offerings but is more affordable and easier to use.

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

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

For example, online course developers not only add features such as video conferencing that make the online course more like a classroom setting, they also create online tutorials and student discussion forums that the traditional face-to-face course doesn't provide.

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.

At the same time, he argued, the desire to attract and satisfy students as though they are mere customers leads to academic coddling, in the form of easy grades and expensive facilities and entertainments, such as intercollegiate athletic teams.

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.