The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.
下一代在线教育是学生的福音——也是大学的灾难。
Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
和成千上万的其他美国人一样，Barbara Solvig去年丢了工作。50岁的她是三个孩子的母亲，多年前，她在东北伊利诺伊州大学读书，不过未能拿到文凭。此后，和有本科文凭的同事相比，她的工资总要低一些。所以，一月份她被芝加哥一家医院的人力资源部门被辞退时，她知道自己该获得一张本科文凭了。这么做可不容易，因为四年文凭要求Solvig生活缺乏的两大奢侈品：离开劳动大军数年，还有一大笔钱。
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?
幸运的是，现在有了新选择。她上网搜索了适合她钱包和时间的东西，然后有一则广告引起了她的注意：一家名为StraighterLine的公司在提供会计学、统计学、数学等在线课程。这其实并无非同寻常之处——成百上千的机构在网上兜售学历。不过让StraighterLine脱颖而出的是她需要的那么多课程，公司每月只收取99元。“简直像骗局”，Solvig这样想——她在网上遇到的骗子公司和硬性推销战术太多了。不过区区99元，为什么不冒个险？
Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail. And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.
Solvig全心投入到学习中，每天学习18个小时。出乎她的意料，这些课程正是她要找的。每天早上她坐在餐桌旁，登陆网站，接触课程资料，读课文，看视频，听播客，完成练习，然后参加考试。也有在线学习群，她可以通过邮件列表和即时通信与其他学生协作。StraighterLine的课程由具有博士学位的教授研发监督，还给她委派了一名顾问，可以通过电子邮件联系。如果Solvig停滞不前，需要帮助，真实的老师随时都在，不论白天黑夜，只要一点鼠标即可。
Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.
对于Solvig——她需要尽快回到劳动大军中——很关键的是，StraighterLine让学生按照自己的进度快慢学习课程。一旦一门课结束了，Solvig可以继续下一门，而无需多支付费用。在不到2个月的时间里，她已经完成了整整4门课，总额还不到200元。如果在东北伊利诺伊州大学，同样的课程要花她2700元以上，在卡普兰大学则为4200，凤凰城大学为6300， 而在私立名校，则大概相当于中美小国的国内总产值了，而且这些学校花的时间要长2-3倍。
And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.
如果Solvig需要任何证明表明在线教育货真价实的东西，某天她女儿从当地社区大学回来抱怨数学课时，她找到了这种证据。当Solvig看了看教材，意识到女儿用的教材和她在StraighterLine用的完全一样，都由教科书巨擘McGraw-Hill编写。唯一的区别是，她女儿花的钱比她多得多，而且只能按照学校的课表进行。虽然有个教授，也不怎么教东西。“他就往那一站，”Solvig的女儿说，而学生们都自学。
StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.
StraighterLine是伯克·史密斯的创意，他是一位互联网企业家，执意要对已有500多年历史的高等教育DNA进行改革。史密斯希望看到学生们能够无缝结合从众多在线提供商处得到的学分和学位，每位提供商都专攻某些课题——最重要的——价格竞争激烈，而非囿于象牙塔内或面对无名的校园，史密斯本人可能是改革大学的人物，也可能不是，但有办法有远景彻底改变学生体验高等教育并为之买单方式的人势必要出现。
In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.
近些年，美国人已经习惯了生活在曾经辉煌的各种工业的乌烟瘴气残骸之中——汽车制造业破产、华尔街的品牌银行倒闭，报业垂死挣扎。在这种环境下，我们很有冲动从学院和大学的永久性中找安慰，认为我们举世无比的高等教育体系肯定会培养未来几十年的研究和知识工人，但这只是幻象。在信息产业中也有那样的一个时期，技术让销售信息的成本之低，跌破了记录，甚至不稳定。
In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.
这两种趋势结合起来动摇了当代大学的基础，和其他貌似坚不可摧的机构被四分五裂的方式大同小异。在有些方面，巨变倍受欢迎。学生们将从极其低廉的价格中大受裨益——尤其是像Solvig这样缺乏可随意支配的收入又亟需高等学历在日益恶劣的经济环境中竞争的人。不过，这些巨变也严重地威胁着大学提供教学以外的能力，而这种能力正是社会所依靠的：科学、文化、代与代之间的文化传承。
Whether this transformation is a good or a bad thing is something of a moot point—it’s coming, and sooner than you think.
这种转变是好还是不好，毫无意义——事情正在发生，而且比你想象的要快。
I met Burck Smith in his office on L Street in downtown Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2008. Thirty-nine years old, with degrees from Williams and Harvard, Smith looks remarkably like what you’d expect an Ivy League alum named “Burck Smith” to look like: Michael-Lewis-minus-ten-years handsome, open-collar shirts and sport coats, the relaxed confidence of privilege. He talked like someone who’d seen the future and was determined to be there when it arrived.
2008年春天，我在华盛顿特区的L街伯克·史密斯的办公室同他会面。39岁，拥有威廉姆斯和哈佛的学位，史密斯属于典型的常春藤校友：同迈克尔·刘易斯一样英俊，但要年轻10岁，衬衫敞开衣领，运动装，带着因为优越而放松的自信。他谈话时彷佛看到未来一样，而且注定了与未来共进退。
Smith was full of optimism about StraighterLine, which he planned to debut in September of that year. It would be the realization of an idea he’d been dreaming about since he was a graduate student at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in the late 1990s. In 1999, after finishing his master’s degree, Smith wrote a “looking back from the future” article, set in a hypothetical 2015. By that time, the higher education landscape would look “dramatically different than it did at the turn of the millennium,” he predicted.
史密斯对StraighterLine完全充满乐观，他计划当年九月推出该项目。这实现了他自上个世界90年代末期在哈佛约翰肯尼迪政府学院读研时就一直存在的梦想。1999年，在拿到硕士学位之后，史密斯写了篇名为“从未来回顾”的文章，背景是假想中的2015年。到那时，他预测，高等教育前景将与“千禧年伊始的教育千差万别”。
Technological change was the spark that ignited the wildfire of change. Like a hole in a dike, cheap and instantaneous Internet-based content delivery and communication nibbled away at barriers to institutional competition… . Suddenly, a student seeking an introductory statistics course could choose from hundreds of online courses from anywhere in the world… . Feeling the effects of low-cost competition, site-based education providers started cutting course costs and prices to attract students.
技术变化是点燃变化的火种。千里之坝，溃于蚁穴，廉价即时的互联网内容提供及通讯蚕食着机制性竞争的障碍…突然之间，想找统计学入门课程的学生可以从世界各地成百上千的在线课程中选择…感受到了低成本竞争的影响，校园教育开始消减课程成本和价格以吸引学生。
That same year, Smith took the first steps toward achieving this vision, launching an Internet startup company called Smarthinking, which he cofounded with Christopher Gergen, the son of well-known Washington insider David Gergen. Smarthinking provided on-demand, one-on-one tutoring in a range of introductory college courses, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The tutors, people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in their fields, communicated with students via computer, using an onscreen, interactive “whiteboard.” Math students typed in questions, graphed equations, and interacted with their tutors in real time from their own PCs. Writing tutors gave feedback on essays within twenty-four hours.
同年，史密斯迈出了达到此目标的第一步，推出了名为Smarthinking的互联网创业公司，这是他与华盛顿知名业内人士David Gergen的儿子Christopher Gergen合建的。Smarthinking根据客户要求，就很多大学入门课程提供一对一的辅导，一天24小时，一周7天。导师们都有各自领域的学士和硕士学位，他们通过计算机用视频互动“白板”和学生沟通。数学学生在自己的电脑上提问、写方程式，与导师实时互动。写作课老师会在24小时内就学生的作文给出反馈。
Smarthinking survived the dot-com crash because, unlike most of their entrepreneurial peers, Smith and Gergen had actually come up with a working business model. Their clients were colleges and universities which, looking to cut costs, outsourced tutoring in the same way companies farm out IT work, back-office support, and customer service to call centers overseas. Smith and Gergen knew that tutoring could take advantage of the same powerful economies of scale that made call centers profitable. It would be cost prohibitive for a single college to provide on-demand 24/7 tutoring for a few sections of, say, organic chemistry—the college would have to hire teams of full-time workers to work in eight-hour shifts, and much of their time would be idle. Smarthinking pooled the demand from hundreds of colleges and tens of thousands of students while hiring credentialed tutors in places like India and the Philippines. As long as “on demand” was defined as a high likelihood of being served within a few minutes, economies of scale and cheap foreign labor could be combined to drive per-student service costs to unheard-of lows.
Smarthinking顶住了网络公司泡沫的冲击，依然存在，不像大多数企业同侪，史密斯和Gergen已有了运作成功的商业模式。他们的客户是学院和大学，都在力争削减成本，跟公司外包IT工作、办公室后勤支援、将客户服务外包给海外呼叫中心一样，他们也在外包教学。史密斯和Gergen知道教学可以利用使呼叫中心盈利的强大有力的规模经济。让一所大学按学生要求在少数几个领域比如有机化学提供24/7辅导成本上不允许——大学必须雇佣全职教师队伍8小时轮班，而大部分时间他们都无事可做。Smarthinking将几百所大学成千上万学生的需求汇集在一起，然后雇佣印度和菲律宾等地有资格认证的导师。只要“按需”可以定义为在几分钟之内就能得到服务，规模经济和廉价的外国劳力就可以联手将学生人均成本减到前所未有之低。
As a result, colleges could buy multihour blocks of 24/7 tutoring in subjects like biology and calculus from Smarthinking for much less than it would have cost them to provide that service on their own. By 2008, the company had 386 clients, ranging from big research universities to community colleges and the U.S. Army. Major publishers like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin packaged hours of Smarthinking tutoring with college textbooks and instructional software.
因此，大学可以从Smarthinking购买生物学微积分等学科24/7多时段模块教学，费用比他们自己提供此类服务要低得多。截止2008年，公司已拥有386名客户，从大型研究型大学到社区学院到美国军队。大型出版商如Pearson和Houghton Mifflin将Smarthinking的课程和大学课本及教学软件打包。
But Smarthinking still fell short of Smith’s ambitions. He had built a particularly efficient cog in the mammoth, long-established higher education machine—but he hadn’t yet transformed it.
但Smarthinking仍未能满足史密斯的抱负。在历史悠久的高等教育的庞大机器上，他打造了格外有效的齿轮——但还未能改造这台机器。
To be sure, much had changed in higher education. Technology had indeed altered how people went to college—that much Smith had gotten right back in 1999. Broadband access had become ubiquitous, and textbook companies had converted their standard introductory course content into inexpensive, Web-friendly form. While college students in 1999 were still making the transition to a Web-dominated world, 2008’s undergraduates had never known anything else. Both traditional colleges and for-profit companies like Kaplan and the University of Phoenix were diving headfirst into the online market, and students—especially people with day jobs like Barbara Solvig—were signing up in record numbers. Over four million college students—one-fifth of the total nationwide—took at least one online course last year.
诚然，高等教育发生了翻天覆地的变化。技术其实已经改变了人们读大学的方式——跟史密斯1999年的预想差不多。宽带接入无处不在，教科书公司已经将他们的标准入门课程内容转换成便宜的网络友好格式。1999年的大学生还在努力过渡到网络主导的世界，2008年的大学生除了网络，一无所知。传统大学和赢利公司如卡普兰和凤凰城大学都勇往直前冲向在线市场，而学生们——尤其是像Barbara Solvig这样白天还要上班的人——都在报名，数量打破了记录。去年，超过400万名大学生——全国的1/5——至少参加了一门在线课程。
But the other shoe had yet to drop. Even as the cost of educating students fell, tuition rose at nearly three times the rate of inflation. Web-based courses weren’t providing the promised price competition—in fact, many traditional universities were charging extra for online classes, tacking a “technology fee” onto their standard (and rising) rates. Rather than trying to overturn the status quo, big, publicly traded companies like Phoenix were profiting from it by cutting costs, charging rates similar to those at traditional universities, and pocketing the difference.
不过另一只鞋子还有待落下。虽然教育学生的成本下跌了，学费增长却几乎是通胀率的3倍。以网络为基础的课程没有提供承诺的价格竞争——事实上，许多传统大学对在线课程额外收费，在他们的标准（而且日益高涨的）费用上又增加了“技术费”。公开交易的大型公司如凤凰城大学并没有试图推翻现状，而是通过消减成本，收取与传统大学相当的费用，将差额装入口袋。
This, Smith explained, was where StraighterLine came in. The cost of storing and communicating information over the Internet had fallen to almost nothing. Electronic course content in standard introductory classes had become a low-cost commodity. The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call- center model made that much cheaper, too. By putting these things together, Smith could offer introductory college courses à la carte, at a price that seemed to be missing a digit or two, or three: $99 per month, by subscription. Economics tells us that prices fall to marginal cost in the long run. Burck Smith simply decided to get there first.
史密斯解释说，这就是StraighterLine进入的地方。在互联网上存储和沟通信息的成本几乎已降为零。标准入门课程的电子课程内容已成了低成本商品。高等教育中唯一昂贵的东西就是劳力，即只有人才可以的时候雇佣聪明博学的人来帮助学生的价格。而独一无二的Smarthinking的呼救中心模型也使这变得更便宜。通过把这些东西放在一起，史密斯可以按照学生要求提供大学入门课程，而订购价格可以少一位、两位甚至三位数：99美元/月。经济学告诉我们在长期中，价格降至边际成本。伯克·史密斯就想第一个到达。
To anyone who has watched the recent transformation of other information-based industries, the implications of all this are glaringly clear. Colleges charge students exorbitant sums partly because they can, but partly because they have to. Traditional universities are complex and expensive, providing a range of services from scientific research and graduate training to mass entertainment via loosely affiliated professional sports franchises. To fund these things, universities tap numerous streams of revenue: tuition, government funding, research grants, alumni and charitable donations. But the biggest cash cow is lower-division undergraduate education. Because introductory courses are cheap to offer, they’re enormously profitable. The math is simple: Add standard tuition rates and any government subsidies, and multiply that by several hundred freshmen in a big lecture hall. Subtract the cost of paying a beleaguered adjunct lecturer or graduate student to teach the course. There’s a lot left over. That money is used to subsidize everything else.
对于任何目睹其他以信息为基础的产业最近变化的人，这些含意可谓一目了然。大学向学生征收天价学费，一部分原因是他们可以这么做，部分原因也是因为他们不得已。传统大学庞杂而昂贵，提供的服务从科学研究到研究生培养，到通过松散附属的职业运动特许提供大众娱乐。为了资助这些活动，大学想尽办法开源节流：学费、政府资助、研究拨款、校友和慈善捐款。但是最大的摇钱树却是层次较低的本科生教育。因为提供入门课程很便宜，利润相当大。这个算术题很简单：把标准学费和任何政府补贴相加，然后和演讲厅里的大一新生人数相乘，减去助理讲师或研究生的上课费用，剩下不少钱。这个钱就用于补贴其他东西。
But this arrangement, however beneficial to society as a whole, is not a particularly good deal for the freshman gutting through an excruciating fifty minutes in the back of a lecture hall. Given the choice between paying many thousands of dollars to a traditional university for the lecture and paying a few hundred to a company like StraighterLine for a service that is more convenient and responsive to their needs, a lot of students are likely to opt for the latter—and the university will have thousands of dollars less to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.
但这种安排，不论对社会整体多么有益，对于要在演讲厅后面经历痛苦的50分钟的大一新生而言，并非好事。在向传统大学支付几千元和向StraighterLine等公司支付区区数百元就得到更便捷更针对他们需求的服务之间，大多数学生都愿意选择后者——大学少了成千上万的钱用于图书馆、棒球队、中国古诗词专家等等。
What happens when the number of students making that choice reaches a critical mass? Consider the fate of the newspaper industry over the last five years. Like universities, newspapers relied on financial cross-subsidization to stay afloat, using fat profits from local advertising and classifieds to prop up money-losing news bureaus. This worked perfectly well until two things happened: the Internet made opinion and news content from around the world available for nothing, and the free online classified clearinghouse Craigslist obliterated newspapers’ bedrock revenue source, the want ads. Suddenly, people didn’t need to buy a newspaper to read news, and the papers’ ability to subsidize expensive reporting with ad revenue was crippled. The result: plummeting newspaper profits leading to a tidal wave of layoffs and bankruptcies, and the shuttering of bureaus in Washington and abroad.
如果如此选择的学生变成了大多数，会怎样？想想过去5年里报界的命运。和大学一样，报纸仰赖财政交叉补贴才得以经营，用当地广告和分类广告的丰厚收入来弥补亏损的新闻部门。这一切都运作完美，直至两件事情发生：互联网让人们可以免费得到世界各地的观点和新闻内容，而免费的在线分类信息交换Craigslist使得报纸的暴利来源招聘广告不复存在。突然之间，人们不需要买报纸看新闻了，而且报纸用广告收入补贴昂贵的新闻报道的能力也大打折扣了。结果：报纸一落千丈的利润导致潮水般的裁员和破产，华盛顿和海外大批办公室纷纷关门大吉。
Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound. Ivy League and other elite institutions will be relatively unaffected, because they’re selling a product that’s always scarce and never cheap: prestige. Small liberal arts colleges will also endure, because the traditional model—teachers and students learning together in a four-year idyll—is still the best, and some people will always be willing and able to pay for it.
像Craigslist一样，StraighterLine威胁了一个大型产业利润最丰厚的部分：大学新生课程，类似于高校中的分类广告。如果有足够的学生转向StraighterLine这样的公司，高等教育面临当前体系建构之上的商业模式的解体。其后果将会极其深远。常春藤和其他名校相对不会受影响，因为他们出售的是稀缺而昂贵的产品：声望。小的自由艺术学院也会持续，因为传统模式——在四年田园牧歌式的生活中师生一起学习——仍然是最佳选择，总有人情愿也能够为此买单。
But that terrifically expensive model is not what most of today’s college students are getting. Instead, they tend to enroll in relatively anonymous two- or four-year public institutions and major in a job-oriented field like business, teaching, nursing, or engineering. They all take the same introductory courses: statistics, accounting, Econ 101. Teaching in those courses is often poor—adjunct-staffed lecture halls can be educational dead zones—but until recently students didn’t have any other choice. Regional public universities and nonelite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return.
但是那个超级昂贵的模型并非当今大多数大学生所得到的。其实，他们更倾向于在相对籍籍无名的2年或4年制公立学校报名，然后找份跟工作有关的专业，比如商业、教育、护理或工程。他们上的入门课都一样：统计学，会计，经济101。教授这些课程通常条件都很差——助理讲师上课的演讲厅可谓教育死角——可在此之前，学生别无选择。地区公立大学和普通私立大学面临StraighterLine等公司的挑战最大。它们可能走上当地报纸之路，受到地理、集团以及昂贵的劳工结构的致命束缚，过度依赖一去不复返的利润。
By itself, the loss of profitable freshman courses would be devastating. And in the long run, Web-based higher education may not stop there. Companies like StraighterLine have the hallmarks of what Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen and entrepreneur Michael Horn describe as “disruptive innovation.” Such services tend to start small and cheap, targeting a sector of the market that established players don’t care much about—like tutoring in introductory courses. “This allows them to take root in simple undemanding applications,” Christensen and Horn write. “Little by little, the disruption predictably improves… And at some point, disruptive innovations become good enough to handle more complicated problems and take over, and the once-leading companies with old-line products go out of business.”
失去盈利的大一课程，后果不堪设想。在长期中，网络高等教育不可能停滞不前。像StraighterLine这样的公司具有哈佛商学院教授Clayton Christensen和企业家Michael Horn所说的“破坏性创新”的特点。这些服务起步都是小规模经营，价格低廉，目标是成熟玩家不在乎的市场领域——比如入门课程辅导。“这让他们植根于简单应用，”Christensen和Horn写到。“可以预言，这种毁灭会一点点地改善…..在某个时点，毁灭性创新会完善，足以应对复杂问题，并且占领市场，而只提供过气产品一度领军的公司则会失去生意。”
The pattern has played out in industries ranging from transistors to compact cars. When Japanese companies like Honda first began selling small, fuel-efficient cars in America, the vehicles were markedly inferior to the chrome- festooned behemoths rolling off the assembly lines of invincible Detroit giants like Ford and General Motors. But they were also inexpensive—and, when gas prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, suddenly more attractive as well. Japanese cars gradually improved while American companies lapsed into complacency, and the rest is history.
在各个产业，从晶体管到小型车，这种模型都在上演，范围很广。当本田等日本公司开始在美国销售小型燃油节约型汽车时，这些车与底特律无敌巨人福特和通用汽车生产线上下来的合金大型车相比，处于绝对劣势。可是，它们那么便宜——当1970年代汽油价格飙升时，突然之间就变得炙手可热了。日系车逐渐改善，而美国车却沉浸在自满中，从而成为了历史。
Econ 101 for $99 is online, today. 201 and 301 will come. It’s no surprise, then, that as soon as Burck Smith tried to buck the system, the system began to push back.
99元是今天在线课程Econ 101的价格。201和301会来。那么当伯克·史密斯尝试松开系统时，系统开始倒退，也不足为奇。
The biggest obstacle Smith faced in launching StraighterLine was a process called accreditation. Over time, colleges and universities have built sturdy walls and deep moats around their academic city-states. Students will only pay for courses that lead to college credits and universally recognized degrees. Credits and degrees can only be granted by—and students paying for college with federal grants and loans can only attend—institutions that are officially recognized by federally approved accreditors. And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they’re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online. To compete, Smith needed StraighterLine courses to be as inexpensive as they could be.
在推出StraighterLine时，史密斯遇到的最大问题就是认证过程。随着时间推移，高校在自己的学术城邦周围修建了坚实的城墙和很深的护城河。学生只为可以得到学分普遍认可的学位课程买单。学分和学位只能由联邦批准的认证中心官方认可的机构颁发——而且只有用联邦拨款和贷款买单的学生才能获得。而最具声望的认证机构只承认这样的机构：有学术系部、高学历的教职员工、行政机构、图书馆以及现代大学所有的所有其他不菲装备。这些东西使得高等教育更加昂贵，如果你只想提供在线入门课程，这些都不必要。为了竞争，史密斯需要让StraighterLine 课程尽可能便宜。
So he devised a clever way under the accreditation wall, brokering deals whereby a handful of accredited traditional and for-profit institutions agreed to become “partner colleges” that would allow students to transfer in StraighterLine courses for credit. After the credits were accepted—laundered, a cynic might say—students could theoretically transfer them anywhere else in the higher education system. The partner colleges stood to benefit from the deal as well. They all had their own online endeavors, but those required hefty marketing investments to keep new students enrolling. The schools reasoned that the StraighterLine relationship would introduce them to potential new students, with some StraighterLine customers sticking around to take their more advanced (and expensive) courses.
所以他在认证壁垒之下，设计了很巧妙的方法，与少数几家传统赢利认证机构达成协议，成为“伙伴院校”，可以将StraighterLine课程转化为学分。在学分认可之后——愤世嫉俗者可能说是学分被洗之后——理论上，学生可以将这些学分转入任何高教系统。伙伴院校也从中获利。他们都有自己的在线课程，但需要巨额营销投入才能不断吸收新生。学校的说法是，StraighterLine关系会使他们接触潜在的新生，而有些StraighterLine客户甚至还想上他们的高级（昂贵）课程。
One of StraighterLine’s original partner colleges was Fort Hays State University, just off I-70 in Hays, Kansas. Smith had met the school’s provost, Larry Gould, at a higher education technology conference back in 2001. Soon after, Fort Hays became one of the first clients for Smarthinking’s tutoring services. When Smith approached Gould in late 2007 with the StraighterLine concept, the provost paid four faculty members to review StraighterLine’s curricula and course materials—a level of scrutiny, he notes, that far exceeds that given to most credits students transfer in. “Right now students can bring in up to sixty credits from community colleges,” Gould told me, “even though we often don’t know who taught those courses or even what the syllabi look like. The StraighterLine people we know, and the course materials are there to see.”
StraighterLine最初的伙伴院校之一是Fort Hays州立大学，就在堪萨斯州Hays I-70洲际公路 边上。在2001年的教育技术会议上，史密斯遇到了该校的教务长Larry Gould。很快，Fort Hays成了Smarthinking辅导服务的第一批客户。当2007年末，史密斯向Gould推出了StraighterLine概念，教务长花钱请四名员工审查了StraighterLine的课表和教材——他说，审慎程度远远超过了学生们要转入的学分审查。“目前，学生可以从社区大学获得60个学分，”Gould告诉我，“即使我们不知道谁给这些学生上课，或者课表如何，我们看得到StraighterLine的人和教材。”
But as word of the StraighterLine deal spread around the Fort Hays campus, professors and students began to protest. By early 2009 a Facebook group called “FHSU students against Straighter Line” had sprung up, attracting more than 150 members. “Larry Gould,” they charged, “has taken steps that will inevitably cheapen the quality and value of a degree from Fort Hays State University by placing our university in bed with a private corporation… . [T]he end result of this move is that FHSU would have a viable reason to eliminate faculty positions in favor of utilizing services like Straighter Line.” The English Department announced its displeasure while a well-known academics’ blog warned of the encroaching “media-software–publishing–E-learning-complex.” Gould was denounced in the Fort Hays student newspaper.
但是，随着StraighterLine交易的消息传遍了Fort Hays校园，师生们开始抗议。2009年初， Facebook上出现了一个名为“FHSU学子反对Straighter Line”的群组，吸引了150多名成员。 “Larry Gould,” 他们批判道，“采取措施让我们学校与私人企业同床共枕，势必会削弱Fort Hays州立大学文凭的质量和价值… .这个行动使FHSU有充分的理由削减教师职位，利用诸如Straighter Line等服务。”英语系宣布其不满，而一个知名的学术博客则警告大家当心不断入侵的“媒体-软件-发布-电子学习的联合体。”Fort Hays 学生报纸公然抨击Gould。
Soon the story was picked up by the national higher education trade publication Inside Higher Ed, which caught the attention of the accreditor that oversees Fort Hays. The accreditor began asking questions, not just of Fort Hays but also of some of the other partner colleges, including for-profit Grand Canyon University and Ellis University. This prompted more news coverage and Internet chatter; one blog led with the headline, “Something Crooked About StraighterLine?”
很快，全国高等教育商业出版物Inside Higher Ed报道了该故事，引起了监管Fort Hays的认证机构。该认证机构开始质疑，不仅仅质疑Fort Hays，也质疑其他合作大学，包括盈利的大峡谷大学和伊利斯大学。这导致了更多新闻报道和网上讨论；甚至有篇博文的标题就是，“StraighterLine不诚实？”
Within months, Grand Canyon and Ellis had ended their involvement with the company. The controversy eventually took a toll on Fort Hays as well; in June the university informed StraighterLine that it was considering bringing the relationship to an end. Smith had to recruit several new partner colleges to stay afloat.
数月中，Grand Canyon和 Ellis不再参与该公司事务。这个矛盾最终也使Fort Hays遭受重创；6月份，校方通知StraighterLine他们在考虑结束合作关系。史密斯不得不招募几所新院校才能顺利经营。
When I spoke with Smith again in June, the whole experience had left him frustrated. “A couple of posts from grad students who’ve never even seen or taken one of the courses pop up on Facebook,” he said, “and North Central [the accreditor] launches an investigation. Meanwhile, there are horror stories about bad teaching at regular universities on RateMyProfessors.com”—a popular student feedback site—“and they don’t give it a second look.” Since traditional colleges provide virtually no public information about how much students learn in their introductory courses and won’t even agree on a common standard for how such results could be measured, there was no way for Smith to prove the quality of his courses in the face of accusations. And Smith’s Facebook critics weren’t looking all that closely at their own institution; even as they warned, “If we don’t fight against Straighter Line, it will be the death of the awesome, face-to-face education that FHSU has provided students for decades,” the university was itself teaching thousands of students online through the Fort Hays “Virtual College,” and using Smarthinking tutors to do it.
6月，我再次与史密斯交谈时，整个经历让他倍受挫折。“有些根本没有看过或上过我们课程的研究生在Facebook上发帖，”他说，“然后North Central（认证中心）开展了调查。同时，在RateMyProfessors.com（一个很流行的学生反馈网站）上出现了对常规大学恶劣的教学质量的恐怖报道，他们甚至都不再多看一眼。”由于传统大学几乎不提供学生在入门课程中学到多少内容的公开信息，甚至没有衡量结果的公用标准达成共识，在面临指摘时，史密斯无法证明他的课程质量。而史密斯的Facebook批判者也没有仔细看看自己的学院；甚至就在他们警告“如果我们不与StraighterLine对抗，FHSU数年来为学生提供的令人敬畏的面对面的教育就会死亡”的同时，大学本身却通过Fort Hays的“虚拟学院”在线教授数千名学生，并且还利用Smarthinking的导师这么做。
Meanwhile, Smarthinking’s executive management team (the company is privately held) began questioning why they were spending so much time and effort beating against the accreditation wall. StraighterLine enrolled a few hundred students in its first year of operation, accounting for only a marginal piece of Smarthinking revenues. The company’s core business was serving colleges and universities, they reasoned, not competing with them. By the end of July, Smith had stepped down as company president and was finalizing negotiations to take over StraighterLine as a separate business.
同时，Smarthinking的执行管理团队（公司为私有）开始质疑为什么他们花这么多时间和精力打破认证壁垒。StraighterLine第一年运作时招募了几百名学生，对于Smarthinking的利润只是杯水车薪。他们认为该公司的核心业务是为学院和大学服务，而非与之竞争。7月底，史密斯辞去了公司总裁的职务，最终谈判，将StraighterLine当做独立业务接管下来。
Smith’s struggle to establish StraighterLine suggests that higher education still has some time before the Internet bomb explodes in its basement. The fuse was only a couple of years long for the music and travel industries; for newspapers it was ten. Colleges may have another decade or two, particularly given their regulatory protections. Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today.<
