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  • Apple U / Cisco U / Google U / Microsoft U

    By Joshua Kim January 26, 2011 10:58 pm EST

    10 Ideas and Reasons for an Apple, Cisco, Google and Microsoft University:

    1. Programs: Focus on high-end graduate degrees. Perhaps a "Strategic Executive MBA with a Technology Focus." Or a PhD in "Organizational Behavior and Systems Design." It may be that for accreditation the company will need to partner with an existing institution, but this should be possible. Start with a small cohort of professors and students. Build the program around what the company does best, and where the company wants to develop a talent and knowledge pipeline for recruitment and leadership development.



    2. Delivery: The delivery method should be primarily online, with brief face-to-face sessions on the corporate campus. On-ground sessions should rotate internationally, with required sessions taking place at corporate offices in places like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, etc. The global nature of the degree should be stressed.

    

3. Costs: Starting up Apple, Cisco, Google or Microsoft University would be pretty cheap. The university does not need to be big to meet its goals. There is no need to cover every discipline, or offer degrees in areas where the demand is strong. These companies could start small, offering one degree program within a core company competence. For less than $10 million (a rounding error for these businesses), any of these companies could get a university off the ground. A relatively small professional staff of learning designers and curriculum experts could complement the in-house subject matter experts (faculty), and the companies technology resources and expertise could be leveraged to build the university. 



    4. Faculty: The faculty should be a mix of new hires and existing employees. Each of these companies has strong research operations, and it is these researchers and top strategic people who should be teaching. Teaching at the University could be a mark of status within the company, a high-profile assignment for the "high-potentials."

    5. Learning: Each of these companies has a big stake in higher ed, and the very best way to provide better products and services to education is to learn what colleges and universities really need. The best way to learn this is to actually have to do it. Creating, running and sustaining a university is hard, and the lessons are best learned first-hand.



    6. Innovation: Running a university will force each of these companies to innovate. They will need to come up with new products and services to run the university, innovations they can then bring to scale across the higher ed market.



    7. Partnerships: All of these companies have products and services in the higher ed space, but none of these companies has enough products and services to meet every requirement and need for running a full online university. They will be forced to partner and to integrate. Customers want products and services that play nice with those offered by competitors, we want integration.

    

8. Tuition: Set a high tuition, but offer very generous grants for qualified applicants. I can guarantee you that many smart and ambitious people would pay full freight to get an Apple, Cisco, Google or Microsoft MBA or PhD. Who wouldn't want a world-class graduate degree with an inside track for hiring at the company that is running the university? Applicants would know that the company is highly motivated to create a world-class learning experience, as the university will be closely watched and scrutinized by the press and the existing education establishment.



    9. Marketing: How much press and attention would an Apple, Cisco, Google or Microsoft University command? Some people would be excited by the idea. Some people will hate the idea. But everyone will have an opinion.



    10. Disruption and Diffusion: I think Apple, Cisco, Google or Microsoft could do something really amazing in higher ed. Each company would have a chance to re-think the graduate education experience from the ground-up, and create the sort of degree that is designed for the leaders of the new digital global economy. Each of these companies would be highly motivated to share these innovations with the rest of the education community.

Education will be one of the most resilient, fastest-growing, and most profitable sectors in the 21st century. Every organization needs to re-cast and re-make itself into a learning organization. Education will increasingly be produced, mediated, and consumed via technology. Education will be unbundled from traditional place based delivery methods. Education will be mobile, flexible, nimble, and personalized. Education is global, with the fastest growth in demand occurring in the emerging economies.

For all these reasons, (and many more), it makes sense for companies like Apple, Cisco, Google and Microsoft to step over that line from selling to higher ed providers to experimenting with becoming a higher ed provider.



    Who wants to go first?

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Comments on Apple U / Cisco U / Google U / Microsoft U

  • Taking the mountain to Mohammed
  • Posted by Ed Garay at University of Illinois at Chicago on January 27, 2011 at 8:15am EST
  • Sounds good, except we've talked about this corporate U's since we started entertaining, planning and actually delivering online learning programs in the late '90s.

    Easier said that done, especially, if a comprehensive quality graduate education remains the goal.

    Also, with respect with point (4), Re: the faculty, I am not quite convinced that corporate stars at Apple, Google, .et al would necessarily make quality teachers. Sure, beaming in Steve Jobs, Kevin Lynch, Ray Ozzie and others into our classrooms for a talk or two can be real good, having them hang out at our class discussion boards, blogs and wikis, perhaps, even better, but I seriously doubt about their effectiveness in delivering sustained quality education.

    Ray, btw, is a UofI alumn, and Kevin was a UIC student before going to Macromedia and now being the CTO at Adobe. Don't get me wrong, these people and their miscellaneous geniuses might be well too familiar with higher education, how to teach and how people learn, but star university professors? They are not.

    I get it :: perhaps, they can hire us (academics) to go teach their corporate U's and bring the mountain to Mohammed.

    Greetings from Chicago.
  • Posted on January 27, 2011 at 9:30am EST
  • Incoming students would be a)employees of said companies b)"traditional" students coming from "traditional" degree programs c) professionals at tech/progressive companies who have been out of school for a while d) all the above? And their objective for attaining a graduate degree from company U. is a) to go to work at that company b) get a "name brand" graduate degree to use in the marketplace c) other? And company U.'s incentive to train up talent for their competitors is...?
  • Don't forget Amazon
  • Posted by Tony Hursh , eLearning Specialist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on January 27, 2011 at 10:00am EST
  • Amazon definitely has the technical chops and funding to jump into this area -- plus they have serious clout with publishers. They also the Kindle, which gives them a preexisting large-scale sales and distribution system and a technology that runs on mobile devices from other manufacturers as well as their own.
  • Yes!
  • Posted by Marjorie Vai on January 27, 2011 at 10:30am EST
  • Great idea. I was at The New School in NYC for twenty years. In its early days teachers were the best and brightest from their specialized fields in the area. They wanted to share their knowledge with the next generation. They were highly motivated and were not usually concerned about Monet or academic status. The focus was on getting the best qualified people to teach, not necessarily the people with the highest level degrees.

    With online education, a university no longer needs to be in a major city like NY to do this. Perhaps the most powerful application of this idea would come in the form of a collaborative effort with the goal of responding directly to President Obama's call to action on improving education and emphasizing innovation!

    As for whether these folks would make good teachers, that continues to be a serious challenge for most universities. The reality is that the ability to teach well is too often not a factor in hiring decisions at universities. The best functioning companies that might take up a challenge like this also might succeed at applying the same levels of excellence to teaching that they do to running their companies. It would be in their interest to do so.


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