Future Vision of Education Case Study
FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY
Future Vision of Education Case Study: University of Phoenix
Fariborz Foroutan
EDU505: Future of Education
Post University
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY
Future Vision of Education Case Study
This paper will talk about University of Phoenix as an educational organization. It will include the past and present of this organization. In addition to that, it describes what kind of educational organization it is. This will also show the population the organization serves such the age group, background and income class of the students educated in this organization. It will also examine the futuring techniques such scanning and creating scenarios. It will evaluate the future vision of education, technology in education, economical changes and public policies, demographic trends. It will also offer a vision or plan for the next five years to come, a plan to change and a call to action.
University of Phoenix
In 1976, Dr. John Sperling, a Cambridge-educated economist and professorturned-entrepreneur, recognized and took hold of an opportunity to provide the working adults looking for higher education by providing well-situated class times at local sites. Now, they are the largest private university in the United States providing undergraduate and graduate degree programs at more than 100 places, in addition to online programs in many countries around the globe (“History”). University of
Phoenix offers educational opportunity to all kinds of age groups, ethnicities, and low, medium or high income families especially military service personal.
They have led the way in offering many of the services that students now enjoy by being innovative in education, such as evening classes, flexible arrangements, constant enrollment, a student-centered atmosphere, online classes, a digital library and computer simulations. In addition to that, this University has 20 years experience in online education. The type of education they offer is researchproven to be just as successful as standard instruction if not more (“History”).
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY
A decade after University of Phoenix had opened, they had 6,000 students.
However, John Sperling wanted his university to grow bigger. They started online classes in 1989. At that time, most people had no email, but there was a service called
Prodigy that some professionals were starting to use. An online MBA program was developed. A parent company called the Apollo Group was created which was taken public 1994. After that, they grow fast (Hanford, 2015).
They offer classes with flexible schedules instead of working on a semester or quarter time structure. This means people can start right away and enroll at University of Phoenix year-round ("Our Philosophy"). This seems to work for people who work and have a family to take care of. It gives them the freedom to go about their daily lives and achieve a higher education. They offer undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs in: Business & Management, Education, Nursing, Health Services
Administration, Security & Criminal Justice, Psychology & Social Sciences, Arts &
Sciences, and Technology.
University of Phoenix mission is to provide higher education opportunities that make it possible for students expand their knowledge and skills required to reach their professional goals, develop the performance of their businesses, and make available guidance and service to their communities. They do this by facilitating affective learning, developing capability in communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and information utilization, providing training that closes the gap between theory and practice, using technology to create effective modes and means of instruction, assessing student learning and using evaluation data, being organized as a private institution to promote innovation, and generating the financial resources required to support the University's mission ("Mission and Purpose").
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY
It seems that they have been successful in this area because of the result they have created over the years they have been operating. Students are graduating and it looks like that they have reached their goals for the most part.
Of the technologies detailed in the Horizon Report , the two which are the best fit are the integration of online and hybrid learning at University of Phoenix.
Students can access educational technologies with their eBook Collection, virtual organizations, simulations, the Center for Mathematics Excellence and the
Center for Writing Excellence via the Internet. Students can also access the classes via their mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices to participate in online class discussions anytime, anywhere ("Technology in the Classroom").
This is appropriate for students who have a busy life style and are on the road all the time. It gives them the freedom to continue their education and improve themselves without being trapped in an office or at home to be able to participate in their classes. They also have hybrid classes which are a combination of online and actual class participation on the campus ("University of Phoenix Online, Campus or
Hybrid (FlexNet) Degree Programs").
Technology creates deep-seated structural differences which can be essential to reaching major improvements in productivity. While using to improve teaching and learning, technology permeates classrooms with learning tools, like computers and portable devices. It makes offering courses, experiences, and learning materials much easier. In addition to that, there is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week support and creates skills which increases student commitment and incentive; and speeds up learning
("Use of Technology in Teaching and Learning").
In conclusion, technology can take learning and teaching experience to a whole different level. It gives teachers and students the tools they need to connect and
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY exchange resources in a way that is impossible to attain in traditional ways. It can improve and personalize learning by offering free educational sources and technologies which can reduce the cost of education and material used in educational environment. University of Phoenix is offering the latest technology available to make sure that students and teachers can interact and exchange ideas as easy as possible.
Futuring Techniques
Futuring techniques can help an educational organization to stay up to date and take advantage of latest trends in the field of education in order to be competitive, attractive and pertinent. Without these techniques, it would be very hard for an organization to stay in business. This paper will discuss the importance of utilizing futuring techniques in organizations.
Futuring is the solution to extension, staying pertinent and being feasible.
Successful futuring will increase the quality of decision-making significantly, encourage proactive approaches to predict change instead of the reactive approach, create a more efficient and sensible framing, assessing and positioning of program priorities and arranging present and future assets to tackle up-and-coming problems.
The decisions made today have consequences which will impact the future generations’ frame extension’s possibility (Sobrero, 2004).
Educational organization should have the courage to connect students to pertinent knowledge and research within different colleges and disciplines of the university. Extension has everything required in order to apply futuring as a feasible originator of planning and updating current program course. Many states have the technology for projecting anticipated futures instead of simply analyzing trends. The problem is not the issues that organizations face. The problem is to respond with
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY outdated and irrelevant techniques which could make the problem even worth
(Sobrero, 2004).
Scenarios Overview
Scenarios are techniques used to establish thinking about potential future outcomes which could reduce surprises and expand the span of managers’ thinking concerning various possibilities. Scenarios should offer strategists for different probable future outcomes, but they should not anticipate the future. Government planners, corporate managers and military analysts have used scenarios as dominant tools to help in decision making in case of uncertainty. Scenarios are similar to a bunch of stories built around carefully created plots. These stories can convey various viewpoints on difficult events. The scenarios themselves make sense of these events.
Today it is uncertain what scenarios really are, but they are used as a prime technique for future studies by various organizations (Mietzner, 2005).
Pros of Scenarios
The strength of scenarios is that they describe several realizable or desirable futures placed side by side
(multiple futures).
Scenarios open up the mind to unimaginable possibilities; in addition, scenarios help managers to rethink drastically the hypotheses for their strategies.
Scenarios are great tools to identify
‘weak signals’, technological problems or disruptive situations and encourage proactive management plans.
Scenarios can create a universal language for dealing with strategic problems by opening a strategic dialogue in an organization.
The goals, opportunities, threats, and strategies are shared between the members. This will lead to the organizational learning and the decision making course
Cons of Scenarios
Scenarios are very time-consuming.
Therefore, a half-day or one day activity may not be enough for the members to do it right.
The selection of appropriate members or experts must be done carefully, and this could be difficult to accomplish.
It is necessary to have a deep understanding and familiarity of the field under investigation. Data from various sources are needed.
Wishful thinking throughout the scenario-building procedure could be hard to avoid.
To improve scenario techniques, they should be combined with other future methods, such as road mapping, Delphi, creativity techniques.
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY enhancement.
Building a scenario is very flexible, and it can be in sync with specific a situation or task.
(Mietzner, 2005).
Scanning Overview
Scanning is one of the futuring techniques used to examine environmental, social, political, economic, and technological changes. These changes will have an impact on the nature and the future of an organization. It uses existing national and international data to review of the consequences and force of the change. Scanning the environment and making data a useful source of information offers the organization a real data-driven intelligence which can update scenarios and predictions (Sobrero,
2004).
Many of researches investigating environmental scanning problems have found six key issues decisions makers have in western companies:
Difficulties of collecting and choosing preventive information
Lack of education and incentive
Failure to organize the information
Difficulties to recognize constructive impact of environmental scanning on organization's performance
Uncertainty in the current of various designation of environmental scanning
Difficulties to comprehend and outline the meaning of environmental scanning (Rouibah, 2002).
In conclusion, developing scenarios and environmental scanning are constructive futuring techniques which could benefit any educational organization.
Economical, social, and technological changes could have a huge impact on the future
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY of educational organizations. Therefore, it is important for an educational organization such as University of Phoenix to implement these techniques in order to be ready for future realities which are inevitable to face.
Future Vision for Education
How will education system be different in the future than today’s old fashion and outdated education system? Today’s education system has not changed much over the last hundred years. Technology is having and will have a huge effect on education now and in the near future. Economical changes and public policies also will shape the system of educating students. Demographic trends are other elements that would change the future of education.
Technology in Education
One of the technological techniques used in education is flipped class method.
The flipped class method is used in order to engage students in and out of the classroom. It is a kind of blended learning. Students go on the Internet to learn through watching video lectures at home, and they do their Guided practice in class with teachers and students by discussing and answering questions. The self-motivated nature of this technique helps teachers to create efficient and fun learning experiences at the same time (Singh, 2014).
This approach will help a teacher to be more like a facilitator and a guide rather than trying to feed student with dry information which is hard for students to picture in their minds to see its relevance to the real life. In the old-fashion passive learning approach, students’ brain will shut down after a short time while it is also frustrating for teachers to keep the students interested in the subject. Technology makes learning more active and fun to be a part of. It helps students to see the real world effect of their learning and understand why they learning these materials. The
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY fact that the students are not stuck in a room for hours for a set time every day and can learn at home and at their own pace is exciting. This, at the same time, creates some challenges such as keeping up with rapid changes that occur in the technological field and the cost of implementing those changes.
The fast and steady pace of change in technology creates opportunities and challenges for educational organizations. The opportunities consist of
Better access to rich multimedia content
The growing use of online course taking to provide classes not otherwise available
The common accessibility of mobile computing devices that can go on the
Internet
The increasing function of social networking tools for learning and professional improvement
The rising interest in the power of digital games for more personalized learning.
On the other hand, the speed of change creates major challenges for these organizations. These challenges are:
Schools must always catch up with technological changes.
Some schools keep up with changes, whereas many of them are falling far behind, creating a divide based on the quality of educational technology, instead of only using the Internet ("Technology in Education", 2011).
Economical changes and public policies
“The strong focus on college affordability amidst the state-to-student cost shift in who pays for college will once again bring considerable attention to tuition policy in many states” (Hurley, 2013). Tuition price increases have been investigated heavily
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY and will be a contentious discussing subject for policymakers in this year’s governmental meetings. Since 1987, the cost of education at public universities has increased twice as much, whereas government financial support for higher education has been reduced by one-third. By 2012, the income collected by public universities in 20 states was more than the money the government provided for educational costs.
Many of higher education leaders have promised to governors and governments to freeze the fees in return for steady or better state financial support (Hurley, 2013).
“State spending for public colleges and universities dropped sharply last year, as the state-by-state numbers contained in this special report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education demonstrate. In addition to that, tuition and required fee charges rose significantly in many states, and some states reduced their student financial aid programs” (Trombley, 2003).
When the cost of education increases, that makes it almost impossible for lowincome families or adult workers who have to take care of their families to be able to take advantage of the higher education system. Public policies should focus on the affordability of higher education for families who cannot afford to send their children to public universities let alone the top ones. Some private educational organizations are putting more emphasis on the profit part of their organization rather than the educational part of it. Many students pay high tuitions to these organizations hoping to learn something and earn a diploma which would help them to improve their lifestyles. If the federal or states governments support these organizations substantially, they will probably focus more on the quality of education instead the financial part of it. Financial aid is a solution that is already in function. However, controlling and keeping the cost of education down may help to keep higher education
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY affordable for many families and many future students to come. States should be vigilant to make sure that the cost of higher education does not go out of control.
Demographic trends
Since many students stem from social groups that are usually underprivileged in the society, they cannot take advantage of higher education because of their economical situations. This is a challenge for the government, states, and educational organizations to make sure those students are ready for college or people who choose to join the workforce when they need to start and do well while studying there. A
Higher Education report in 2011 mentioned that the university graduation rate for
Latino students is less than 50 percent of the national average. The report also says that the university graduation rate for African-American students is at 42 percent whereas white students’ graduation is at 62 percent nationwide. Some measures must be implemented in the K-12 education system to lessen the risks for minority students with lower family incomes, such as higher high school dropouts, and language problems (Azziz, 2014).
The society should offer these students quality education from the kindergarten until they graduate from high school. They need a solid foundation to build on. Weaker students are more likely to fail and drop out later in high school and college. Therefore, some changes must be made to increase the quality of education in every part of the K-12 system so that fewer students fail and cannot take advantage of the higher education system. One of these measures could be training more professional teachers who actually enjoy teaching and are more enthusiastic to help the students.
Public schools in the United States are on the crossroad of a new demographic period. This year the number of African-American, Asian, Latino students in the
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY public K-12 system is anticipated to exceed the number of white students for the first time. An increase in the population of Latinos and a decrease in the population of white people is the reason for that. Also, there has been a growth in the Asian
Americans population whereas African-American growth has been the same
(Maxwell, 2014).
In conclusion, Technology will change the face of education in near future by making education an interactive and fun experience. However, that might create some challenges for schools to keep up with technological changes. The cost of education is rising without any significant results. Therefore, changes in public policies related to education are necessary so that government and educational organizations can offer affordable education to students from minority groups and low-income families through making access to financial aid easier and keeping the cost of education as low as possible. Also, public policies should make it easier for everyone from a lower socio-economic status to have access to higher education by offering high-quality education from the very beginning of the K-12 system.
Vision/plan
Although University of Phoenix has already implement some technologies which helps students access educational technologies with their eBook Collection, virtual organizations, simulations, the Center for Mathematics Excellence and the
Center for Writing Excellence via the Internet, access the classes via their mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices to participate in online class discussions anytime, anywhere ("Technology in the Classroom"), Quantified self technologies could be another technology they could take advantage of for their future education system.
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People always show interest in learning about themselves by checking and evaluating their activities and the way they behave. Students already use their time in traditional classrooms collecting information about themselves or research subjects.
Quantified self technologies take advantage of this interest by using mobile apps, wearable devices, and cloud-based services which make the process of gathering information a great deal easier. These technologies offered people wider selfawareness of their actions through self-tracking, in addition to new methods to think about how to utilize the information gathered ("Horizon Report > 2014 Higher
Education Edition", 2014).
The Quantified Self Institute, for instance, is a proposal by the Hanze
University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands which brings worldwide and local colleagues together to carry out research on various techniques of self-tracking. This institute is well suited to guide the quantified self movement into higher education organizations with recommendations on successful implementations.
The opportunities which these technologies could offer are:
Better students’ involvement and performance.
Teachers will have access to more info about the students.
More focus on personal learning styles.
Creating ultimate learners due to high interest.
Quantified self technologies could be a model technology for 21 st
Century educational organizations.
The challenges which could these technologies face are:
Privacy concerns
Expenditure/benefit analysis about what info should be gathered
What info should be shared
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FUTURE VISION OF EDUCATION CASE STUDY
Who should be in charge for making those decisions
How to build the most effective and safe online communities of practice ("Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition",
2014).
University of Phoenix has to implement this vision for education as a change in their system. If not, they might lose their students to universities which use these kinds of technologies to make learning experience much more effective. In addition to that they might lose their teachers who would like to work for organizations which are innovative and accept change. Finally, they could lose their edge as one the leaders in online education.
Plan for Change
To prepare for implementing these technologies over the next five years,
University Phoenix has to complete a few necessary steps.
Employ and Arrange Planning Team , Team members should represent all stakeholders and should be excellent leaders in planning, relationship, and communication skills.
Research , recognize the technology needs of students and teachers, discover the technologies that can meet those needs, and recognize how to apply them.
Build Technology Plan ; use the info gathered from the research to identify the vision/plan and to classify the objectives and tasks which lead to reaching the vision and mission.
Formalize the Planning; express in a document what is understood, what is real, what should be, and how objectives are reached.
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Frequently execute Evaluate Revise, always check if everything is going as planned ("Guidebook for Developing an Effective
Instructional Technology Plan", 1996).
Call to Action
University of Phoenix has to utilize the futuring techniques such as scanning to evaluate current data and technological trends. Even though UOP is one the leading online institutions, it would be necessary to survey their students to find out how they think about their education’s quality, utilizing of technology, learning styles, and what they would like to have and use to be more successful. In addition, instructors should be surveyed to see what they think about the technologies utilized and the changes in the educational environment.
Another step UOP could take is to create a team which would research about
Quantified self technologies and educational organizations which have already implemented these technologies. This team could ask questions and visit these organizations and find out how these changes could take place in UOP in addition to convincing the students and the instructors of the benefits of these technologies and creating professional expansion of the technologies.
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References
Azziz, D. (2014, April 28). A Looming Challenge in Higher Education: Our Changing
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Hanford, E. (2015). The Story of the University of Phoenix. Retrieved May 4, 2015, from http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrowscollege/phoenix/story-of-university-of-phoenix.html
History. Retrieved May 4, 2015, from http://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/about_university_of_phoenix/history.html
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Hurley, D. (2013). Top 10 Higher Education State Policy Issues for 2013. Retrieved
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Maxwell, L. A. (2014). U.S. School Enrollment Hits Majority-Minority
Milestone. Education Digest , 80 (4), 27.
Mietzner, D., & Reger, G. (2005). Advantages and disadvantages of scenario approaches for strategic foresight. Retrieved May 12, 2015, from http://www.lampsacus.com/documents/stragegicforesight.pdf
Mission and Purpose. Retrieved May 5, 2015, from http://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/about_university_of_phoenix/mission_and_ purpose.html
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Our Philosophy. Retrieved May 4, 2015, from http://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/about_university_of_phoenix/philosophy.ht
ml
Rouibah, K. (2002). Environmental Scanning, Anticipatory Information and
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_1.shtml
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