Unbundling is a hot topic in higher education. There’s a book about it, College Disrupted, by Ryan Craig and The Chronicle of Higher Education started the year with the launch of Re:Learning, an ongoing special report on the new education landscape. But will people or institutions buy what’s getting unbundled?
First, what is unbundling? It’s a term used in the economics and business world to refer to a process in which people can buy separately what had once only been available as part of a larger offering. For a simple but very powerful example, think of the way that Apple unbundled the LP album by offering songs individually through the iTunes store. MOOC’s, coding boot camps and even prior learning assessments are steps toward unbundling the full service college.
Unbundling gets mixed with the idea of outsourcing activities that had been produced internally. Colleges have been doing this for a long time. Many faculty use textbooks and course materials to unbundle elements of instructional design instead of following the traditional path of constructing courses from scratch with original sources (e.g., Shakespeare in a literature course). Residential colleges have long contracted with outside parties for food service, facility maintenance and information technology.
Technology is the accelerant of unbundling. New application development capabilities enable anyone with the right skills to build digital learning, advising or tutoring environments. High speed internet makes it possible to share these environments widely at very low cost compared to face-to-face delivery models.
If technology is the accelerant, then start up companies are the spark. Last year I compiled a list of higher education technology startups that was not meant to be exhaustive but it got long fast. These start ups, and now more established organizations (both for profit and nonprofit), can provide an array of services directly to prospective students, or to institutions, including instructional design, course materials, fully packaged courses, tutoring, advising, career development and more.
So who is going to buy all this unbundled stuff? Unbundling as outsourcing is a more mature market and will grow. Financial and performance pressures will push otherwise reluctant institutions to explore all their options.
But will individual students buy unbundled higher education services at a level that creates a true mass market? I don’t think that will happen without some form of intermediary to re-bundle the right mix of services, add some of their own and create educational pathways that actually work for defined student populations. So the success of unbundling will ultimately depend on the emergence of re-bundlers.
Some colleges have already become re-bundlers as mentioned above. But traditional institutions will be hemmed in by traditional constraints. Unbundling for a mass market will require new re-bundlers who already have access to potential student populations, know what they want, can provide their own place-based value added services and have the entrepreneurial and managerial capability to pull it off.
Where might these new re-bundlers come from? They could come from the ranks of local libraries, museums, youth development groups, secondary schools (especially charter school networks) and even employers who provide sophisticated training programs. For a deeper discussion of some of these possibilities, read chapter 6 in America Needs Talent by Jamie Merisotis of the Lumina Foundation and my blog on a new metro regional approach to building a successful higher education environment.
These entities have great potential to radically change the post-secondary education environment for students who attend local colleges and universities now. They will need to do more than just make unbundled services available to prospective students and must start by building the capacity to be trusted intermediaries to high quality educational and support services. It won’t be easy but with a little effort these organizations can find partners who will help them do it.
Unbundling has the potential to be a major force in reshaping American higher education over the next 25 years. But it will need more – especially the development of a sophisticated notion of re-bundling and the emergence of organizations that can do that – to become a driving force in this new world.
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