Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Are we moving to the all-robot university?

First we were told by Clay Christensen of the Harvard B-School that his disruption theory had finally reached higher education.  Where once higher ed lacked a core technology that enabled ease of entry into our market, now online learning is that ticket that gets the competition past all the bricks-and-mortar bother of building and maintaing a college campus.  Not to mention all the payroll costs connected with a full-time, tenured faculty.

A good example is the University of Phoenix Online, which develops its courses centrally and scripts them for its relatively inexpensive adjunct faculty members.

And now we seem to be facing robotic researchers as well, says the Chronicle of Higher Education.  So, will administration be the next target of automation in higher education?

Thomas Friedman in his latest tome, Thank You for Being Late, (my current car "reading") concludes that jobs requiring high-level technical skill sets and high-level human-relations skill sets in combination will stay around, regardless of the level of AI and automation.

If he's right, then administrators will be the last to go... if, indeed, they can ever get rid of us.


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