TEL-lingit like IT is

I've just finished reading Bharat Anand's The Content Trap , which describes itself as a book "about digital change, and how to navigate it" (Kindle Location 123). It's excellent. Naturally it has much to say about the digital experiences and prospects of traditional media agents - newspapers, television networks, audio and video distributors. What I connected with most, though, was the coverage in the last few chapters considering strategy for digital education . Anand is a key member of the HBx initiative, which represents a further step in Harvard's move online (previous ones being in the form of edX ). This new approach is one implemented by the Harvard Business school. I think HBx cracked it. Anand describes the strategy in these terms: ...we carved out an online learning strategy that departed from the established MOOC model in virtually every respect. We decided to pass on the increasingly standard “camera in the classroom” in favor of a more...

I'm wrestling with a particularly slippery, err, customer . What do we call university, um, subscribers ? "Those who pay for their tuition"? Technically they are 'students' (" a person who is studying at a university or other place of higher education ") more than they are 'customers' (" A person who buys goods or services from a shop or business ") or 'consumers' (" A person who purchases goods and services for personal use "). Anyone who's tried to debate this soon comes to the inevitable yet unhelpful conclusion that "[s]tudents are not customers nor are they not customers" ( Trachtenberg, 2010 ). At least we can all agree that they are, at least, definitely 'students'! But is the term 'student' sufficient? And, what might we risk if we seek to change it to 'customer'? Do we run the risk of overlooking valid, customer-style expectations if we glibly dismiss the term 'cus...