Greetings from Las Vegas where I am attending the Career College Association Conference. It’s been a busy couple days meeting with existing and prospective vendors and colleagues.
Yesterday I listened to Nicholas Donofrio, EVP, IBM, Innovation and Technology discuss Global Integration Opportunities. He shared that his personal educational process developed him into an I Learner — one that had a lot of depth in a particular speciality (he was trained as an engineer.) His argument is that educators must be proponents of T Learning, where there is as much breadth as depth. His point, based on his GIO research and observations, is that without, dramatic change, institutions of higher learning in the United States will not keep pace with the dynamic nature of the new worker. He thought we might even see a trend where U.S. students will completely matriculate to oversees institutions.
Back to my mantra where those of us in online learning will see a sweeping shift, at some point in the future, to performance indicators as a way of ranking online institutions. Our online academicians must be more forward thinking and developing learning models that promote what Donofrio calls the T Learner. Global integration will occur in the educational space at some point as it has in other sectors and we must be prepared.