Online Learning and Higher Ed’s Dark Secret

How quickly things change. As late as 2017 the late Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen was still defending his belief, put forth in his 2011 book The Innovative University, that online learning represented a “disruptive technology” that would close or bankrupt about “half of all colleges in the United States.”1 Today, several months into a pandemic that looks almost designed to obliterate campus-based higher education, college officials see distance learning as higher education’s lifeline. Not only is the entire California State University—the nation’s largest—going exclusively online in the fall of 2020, but a survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that 36 percent of college presidents “anticipate continuing virtual instruction for all of 2020–2021.”2But isolating course content from the physical college experience could reveal a fundamental misconception about what colleges teach, bringing