By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
For more than a decade and a half, people have predicted nearly total, or at least fundamental, changes in higher education. For the most part, these predictions and warnings have fizzled. Whether you think it good or bad, higher education has remained resilient and adaptable to change, looking very much as it did ten, twenty, twenty-five years ago.
Nonetheless, those looking for, or wanting a major re-ordering of the way higher education works may, not too long from now, get something of a victory. The semester, the foundational, rhythmic cycle of calendar-based learning in colleges and universities may be about to see its own sunset.
That’s largely because of online, distance learning. While the prognostication of learning from anywhere has not really panned out, the idea of learning at any time has been a big seller. As schools try to reach non-traditional learners – the older, working, returning to college, part-time students – they’ve learned that flexible timing is essential. And not just any time of day, but at any day in the year.
Accordingly, abolishing the semester as a rigid and seemingly arbitrary point of entry and exit for learning programs is gaining momentum.
Steve Hill, CEO of the Walbrook Institute London, formerly the London Institute of Banking and Finance, said of the college semester, “It’s time for academia to evolve with this need. It’s time to do away with the centuries-old tradition of the academic semester and building stronger, more dynamic partnerships with industries and embedding real-world skills into every stage of learning throughout the calendar year, to ensure students graduate ready to thrive.” Hill continued, “Learning can’t stop at graduation. As businesses transform and new technologies emerge, we need education models that support continuous upskilling and reskilling.”
Hill is not alone. “There are many reasons to reconsider the academic year as it exists. With the exception of teacher’s education graduates, others go into a workforce that is year-round. Why not prepare your graduates to fit easily into a year-round workplace?” asked Anju Visen-Singh, VP of Product and Marketing at Acuity Insights.
Mike Thompson, CEO at Learner Mobile, also agreed that the college semester, as we’ve come to know it, may be past its prime. “Today’s learners have grown up in the digital age,” Thomson said. “So, for them, sitting in a lecture for three hours over a period of 18 weeks certainly feels like somewhat of an outdated and old approach,” he said.
“The traditional academic calendar was built for a totally different era. Certificates, bootcamps, microlearning, continuous learning, all of that is happening outside the semester model. And it’s working. We’re seeing young professionals in tech use microlearning to rapidly learn new skills and to stay ahead of trends without going back to school. Nurses and frontline healthcare workers are turning to on-demand learning modules to upskill between shifts. These aren’t people who can wait for the next semester to start,” said Thompson.
It’s not just outside technology leaders or alternative education providers who are questioning the utility of the semester. Some academic leaders are too.
Michael D. Smith is Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. Smith was blunt, saying, “Higher education’s academic calendar is designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.” Smith also said, “What’s worse is that by maintaining the academic calendar as the primary way to learn, we’re excluding deserving students whose schedules don’t fit within that outdated structure. I’d love to create new ways for students to learn in places and at times that work for their schedules, instead of forcing them to conform to our outdated system.”
Many career-aligned training and certification programs have already obliterated the traditional semester system, welcoming students to start or stop at their pleasure, with frequent, rolling admissions and start dates. Even some schools that offer four-year degrees have coupled open-ended start and stop dates with self-pacing, allowing students to pay for their courses by the month, instead of by the credit and per semester. If you can complete a college course in one month, you pay only for one month, in other words.
So far at least, the most traditional institutions – state flagships, private liberal arts colleges, and the brand-name, Ivy-level schools – have yet to move programs to such highly flexible schedules. And they may not. Those schools are flooded with applicants, and both student and school seem happy fitting students into existing, rigorous, inflexible molds – even if they are outdated.
But those schools represent, generously, about 20% of college enrollments. The other 80% are very likely to throw the traditional semester timelines overboard as they increasingly covet and compete for the students for whom premium time flexibility is paramount.
Moving past the semester as a unit of learning may not be the shake-up that many wanted to see in higher ed, but it will be significant. It may lead to re-examining a more fundamental measure of learning attainment – the credit hour. And while abolishing the credit-hour remains a bridge too far for many, many reasons, the anachronism that is the college semester may not be. In fact, it may already be in the process of collapse.