We are witnessing the remaking of higher education. Strategies for mainstream colleges and universities must change from the short term to the long term as large-scale collaboratives and huge corporations enter the field.

The pandemic has accelerated trends that were already established in the past decade. Over the prior centuries, universities competed for students with other institutions, particularly in their region or with a reputation of success in comparable disciplines. Beginning in the 1990s, we saw the advent of online learning, which began to break down geographic advantages that had held through prior centuries. And yet, for the most part, colleges and universities both inside and outside the region competed against one another in the recruitment of students.

That began to change in 2011 and 2012 when the first truly massive-scale MOOCs were delivered. Not long thereafter came the collaborative massive consortia. Certificates and entire degree programs are offered on massive platforms. Now, competition from massive course providers such as Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, Udacity, Swayam, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, LinkedIn and scores of others are surging at the same time enrollments at colleges and universities are stagnating or declining.

You can explore the courses and numbers at Class Central. With just the top two, Coursera and edX, each accruing more than 100 million “duplicated” enrollments in the past 12 months and soaring growth rates, the signs are strong that these are becoming a dominant delivery mode for learners worldwide. Coursera just reported revenue increased an annual 38 percent to $102 million for the June 2021 quarter, with its enterprises and colleges segment growing 69 percent and 78 percent, respectively.

Meanwhile, undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5 percent from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students. It is not just Coursera and edX that are serving millions more students with college-level learning opportunities; Udacity and other business vendors such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and LinkedIn continue to accelerate their enrollment growth in courses and certificate programs.

As many businesses have learned, it is a serious mistake to underestimate Google and Amazon. Now that they are in the mix, it would appear the sky is the limit for nontraditional vendors of education.

Just as the value of degrees earned online was questioned 10 and 20 years ago, so too are skeptics questioning the value of certificates offered by commercial platforms. The numbers show a different story. Amazon Web Services is the most popular cloud provider. A recent report from State of Cloud shows that “82 percent of hiring managers say cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive and 87 percent of hiring managers value hands-on experience and certifications over a university degree when evaluating candidates.”

Business Because does the math of comparing the ROI of investing in college and university career certificates compared to Google’s certificates:

Google Career Certificates can take less than six months to complete and students can apply their knowledge at the same time and increase their earning potential. The average entry-level salary for roles across the certificate fields is $63,600. With undergraduate courses taking three-plus years and MBA education taking upwards of a year, these courses may be attractive to someone looking to study and earn and gain the necessary qualifications to climb up the career ladder quickly. According to Coursera’s Learner Outcome Survey, 82% of Google certification holders reported a positive career outcome within six months.

Starting at $39 a month, the Google certificates are a bargain. The Balance Careers assesses the strengths of each of the certificates.

LinkedIn Learning offers some 16,000 courses and certifications. Edwize assesses a number of the LinkedIn offerings and concludes, “In our opinion, it is definitely worth it. First of all, you get access to an unlimited amount of courses for $29.99 per month, which is an excellent value for the price point.”

Beyond those mentioned earlier, there are Codecademy, Khan Academy and many more well-known online providers addressing a wide array of vendors across a host of topics. None of these were in the higher education space in any meaningful way a dozen years ago. Now, however, accelerated by the stay-at-home pandemic and the towering debt incurred by students in colleges and universities, these providers are carving out niches in the marketplace of education.

This year, colleges and universities are holding their heads above water due, in large part, to the federal funds that were directly received and that shored up state budgets. The promise of free community college may provide some more enrollments in the short term. But large-scale continuing assistance from the federal government is unlikely to sustain through the coming decades.

How do we prepare for the growing presence of large-scale, low-cost, for-profit providers that are customizing their learning to the ever-changing market? As we prepare to compete with Amazon, Google and other supersize competitors, can we find advantages for our high-priced, years-long degrees? Or do we resign ourselves to be outmaneuvered by the just-in-time business savvy of our new competition?

Standard business practices apply in the short term — cut costs, redefine the customer base, connect more closely to employers in order to enhance our placement rates and student satisfaction, repackage the product, and heavily market digitally. This doesn’t preclude going back to alums to offer just-in-time high-value short-term certificates. Redouble efforts in professional and continuing education. Taking these actions can generate more revenue with low investment in the short term.

In the longer term, we have to reinvent the institution. We must find ways to outmaneuver Google, to compete dollar for dollar with Amazon, to respond to the breadth of LinkedIn Learning and to tap the expanding technical market of Microsoft, IBM and coding academies. We need to explore subscription rather than tuition models to support stacking of learning and credentials. Who is leading this reinvention at your institution? What role are you taking to accelerate change?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching + Learning blog. 

The world is in the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, which is what the World Economic Forum describes as a new era that extends the impact of digitization in new and unanticipated ways.

The fourth industrial revolution has shown up first and most prominently in the high-tech fields. Unsurprisingly, they are the ones leading us to use emerging technologies to enhance productivity, efficiency and reliability. The impact of the revolution is going to reach much further, harnessing the immense and awesome powers of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and innovation to solve challenges that have escaped our reach over the decades and centuries.

In higher education those challenges include personalizing learning — that is, how we can tailor learning to each student’s needs without boring them with redundant learning that they have already mastered or moving too rapidly for full comprehension and retention. A further challenge has been how to keep our teaching and learning relevant to the world today and tomorrow, rather than the past. How can we ensure that learning matches the workplace and marketplace as they emerge? Increasingly, we are challenged with the spiraling costs — in terms of government subsidies and tuition revenue — of degree programs. How can we advance learning at a lower cost so it is affordable and accessible to more learners?

It is artificial intelligence that will facilitate and power the changes needed to address these challenges. At the core of the problem is the organization of the learning process, as Hosni Zaouali writes:

While it’s still too early to evaluate the extent of the change in the quality and scope of instruction that AI might achieve, what is certain is that it will cause a revolution. That is because educational systems around the world remain rooted in the foundations established in the 1800s. Most of all, AI will crush the idea that all students must learn in the same place, in the same way, and at the same speed.

Kai-fu Lee, an AI expert, has described the current education system as an “educational assembly line,” in which children advance from class to class without paying too much attention to differences in terms of learning, personal preferences, and abilities. The role of AI will be to trigger a veritable revolution of the very idea of what constitutes education.

A recent Educause quick poll shows that while a small minority of institutions have artificial intelligence on their radar for recruitment, tutoring and chat-bot engagement, the vast majority have yet to implement any serious pilot programs or to even begin planning to harness the power of AI beyond chat bots and rudimentary adaptive learning programs.

As the business world is deeply engaged in AI, now is the time for higher ed to do the same. Those who begin to reconceptualize their systems and processes early will create efficiencies and competitive advantages in attracting students and accomplish enhanced learning outcomes that are attuned to the societal needs of the future. Eliot Markowitz writes that institutions should now double down on AI investment and implementation. Citing the Avasant RadarView Report on Digital Services 2021-2021, Markowitz writes that institutions should:

Reimagine the student experience by leveraging AI-based solutions for providing personalized communication, gamifying learning experiences, and employing bots to answer queries. “Creating differentiated experiences through personalization and immersive education will play a crucial role in the growth of remote learning,” said Avasant’s Research Leader, Pooja Chopra, in a prepared statement. “Educational institutions should collaborate with EdTech companies and progressive service providers to accelerate digital transformation.”

The Georgia Research Alliance is leading an important NSF-funded, $20 million project to establish the NSF AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (ALOE), headquartered at Georgia Tech. The ALOE Institute will develop new AI theories and techniques as well as new models of lifelong learning, and evaluate their effectiveness at Georgia Tech, Georgia State and multiple colleges within the Technical College System of Georgia, as well as with corporate partners IBM, Boeing and Wiley. Accenture is also participating in the project.

The future of AI is evolving rapidly. There is an international race to take the lead in producing hardware and software for all fields, including education. As Olivia Brookhouse writes, AI is already offering chat bots that can better understand and express social and emotional intelligence. In the longer term, one may ask, as Meghan O’Gieblen does, can robots evolve into “machines of loving grace”?

Are you prepared for sentient computers? How might these serve the learning process? What is the pathway your institution is preparing for AI in the remainder of this decade? Do you have a role in leading the creation of a vision for the future?

Are you ready for the 4IR and the implementation of AI? If you feel you could use a primer on artificial intelligence, I recommend this brief introduction to the key elements of AI, as well as an introduction to some of the applications and concerns. For a deeper dive, Andrew Ng — co-founder of Coursera and a leading expert in AI — offers AI for Everyone, a course for even the nontechnical. Ng has taught more than five million learners and is rated as among the top instructors on Coursera.

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.