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

They must become much more affordable, particularly by embracing online learning technology.

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.

If you have a Ph.D. and you enter most universities and colleges, they assume you know how to teach and so on. We don't assume that. We have a training program. We have an evaluation program; we have feedback on this, so we're constantly evaluating—almost month by month—the quality of what we're doing.

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.

In particular, he noted how scholarly activity tends to distance professors from the undergraduate teaching and learning process.

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.

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.

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.