Icdk outlook No. 04, May 2019 The Future of Education

 
 
Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education 
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2. 
New Alternatives 
The unbundling of higher education? 
Consider the university.
You enter campus grounds, obtain study-tools such as books and pens, go to 
lectures, do your assignments, receive feedback, and in the end of your studies 
you go to exams to eventually obtain a degree with an institutional stamp on it. 
Higher education today is bundled. Lectures, exams, feedback, research, social 
activities etc. all exists as one “package” in the on-campus experience. However, in 
Silicon Valley there are signs that this might be about to change, as technology is 
gaining ground in the field of education, and new models of education are 
emerging. As new technologies develop, innovative new educational institutions 
are forming to offer students more choice as well as flexibility compared to what 
traditional educational institutions offer. In some cases, these alternatives are 
removing the need for classrooms by using online platforms, which enables 
students to obtain a degree from their home computer. Other examples offer very 
specific and skill-oriented degrees or courses, scraping away what they deem 
unnecessary parts of the bundled degree known from traditional universities. Some 
cases are even creating institutions without lectures and teachers to create a 
leaner version of education because technology has enabled the students to learn 
by themselves through online learning platforms (and Google) instead of having an 
educator telling them what to do. 
What do all these new alternatives have in common? They specialize in specific 
components of education, to offer students more choice and flexibility instead of 
the bundled university. In other words, they are unbundling the traditional model 
of higher education. The phenomenon of unbundling can be defined as “the process 
through which products previously sold together are separated into their 
constituent parts” and the trend could pose a challenge to the established 
universities
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Unbundling has historically occurred in various industries as a consequence of 
technological development. For example, in the music industry, where streaming 
services made single songs accessible and replaced the need to buy albums. 
Comparing a music album to education might seem oversimplified, but considering 
the components of the university, it may not be that different after all. Various 
start-ups and companies are emerging to specialize in specific parts of education 
that they envision to change or profit from. Some are non-profit while others work 
as a regular profit-maximizing company, but they all share a vision of how the 
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McCowan, 2017

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