A Flexible Future - Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Some of the country’s most rigorous research universities have a new obsession: flexibility. Institutions such as Duke and Harvard Universities and the Georgia and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology are laying the groundwork for curricula that will be delivered through a combination of face-to-face instruction, blended courses and distance education. A common goal is to offer students “flexibility” -- a word several administrators used to summarize their institutions’ aspirations. Regardless of the definition, flexibility has much in common with MIT’s plans to “modularize” education -- breaking courses down into smaller modules that can be taken on their own or shuffled and rearranged into a more personalized experience. In a preliminary report released last year, MIT toyed with the idea of “unbundling education and blurring boundaries” -- combining distance and in-person instruction to the point where students could one day spend as little as two years on campus. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/02/some-research-universities-flexibility-and-modularity-influence-long-term-plans