What Higher Ed Can Learn from Encyclopaedia Britannica - Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Those of us who work in higher ed will need to make many transitions to stay relevant in an increasingly global and digital economy. We will have good ideas about how to evolve traditional higher education away from the bundled, place-based, discipline centric institutions that we ourselves were educated in, have spent our lives working for, and that we love. Our success in evolving our institutions, however, will not be determined solely by our ideas for change - but instead by our abilities to execute on these ideas. The other development that we completely misunderstood when I worked at Britannica was Wikipedia. When Wikipedia was launched in 2001 I remember many of my colleagues at Britannica completely dismissing the whole idea of a user generated and user editable encyclopedia. The lesson here is that we should acknowledge that higher ed people are perhaps unprepared to recognize and understand models of higher education that are truly different from our own. There may be an analogue to Wikipedia for our traditional colleges and universities, and we are likely to underestimate the impact that this new entrant will have on our core business models.