Clayton Christensen

With Henry J. Eyring, in: "Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out"

As a general rule, the university alters itself only in thoughtful response [...] within fixed bounds; there is rarely revolution of the type so often heralded in business or politics. This steadiness is a major source of universities' value to a fickle, fad-prone society.

competition drives up the price of winning without increasing the number of institutional winners. College education gets more expensive, but it does not get better.

It is generally assumed that reducing the cost of instruction is antithetical to increasing its quality. Likewise, tradition holds that more students can be served only if cost goes up or quality goes down.

some faculty worried that putting more of the teaching responsibility on students would lead to what some called “ignorance swapping.”

They began by specifying what students were to learn, a fundamental step often overlooked in the development of face-to-face courses. That omission is one likely reason that online offerings produce equal or superior cognitive learning outcomes.

In his purely elective system, students could create bachelor's degrees from any combination of courses.

Making minors optional, for example, was expected to reduce the time required to graduate by at least one semester.

effective online learning requires one-and-a-half to two times as much “out-of-class” student support as face-to-face courses do.

The need for near-term employability in particular required significant modification to the traditional bachelor's degree. A conventional general education program seemed like the wrong next step for Pathway students. Applying the modularity principle, the team designed a special curricular pathway by which most of the university's Foundations courses would be preceded by a technical certificate.

social relationships are becoming more complex. The digital world is simultaneously more connected and more fragmented and impersonal.

Ironically, and thankfully, the glorious abundance of the virtual has created an even greater longing for the real. —Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan