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By Ryan Craig, Columnist

In his 2005 book The World is Flat, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Thomas Friedman illuminated the new digital face of globalization, its results and discontents.  Friedman’s “flat-world platform” permits individuals and small groups to compete globally, which results in massive increases in productivity and corresponding dislocations.

Recent headlines in higher education seem to suggest that a flattening world is also flattening the university – creating a world where (IIT) Bombay is a suburb of (MIT) Boston, and of increasing competition and productivity.

Borrowing Friedman’s nomenclature, one major flattener is “uploading,”  defined as individuals and small communities sending up, out and around their own products and ideas, often for free.  Substitute “Sebastian Thrun and Udacity” for “individuals and small communities,” and you have the entire MOOC origins story minus the blue and red pills.

A related flattener is community-developed software or the open-source movement.   The emergence of Moodle serves Friedman’s argument.  A platform for delivering higher education, Moodle is now deployed at over 70,000 educational institutions and boasts total enrollment of over 45M.  The Moodle developer community has over 1M registered users, and earlier this year industry leader Blackboard had no choice but to acquire two of the leading commercial products based on Moodle.

What is odd, though, is that Friedman describes four characteristics of a flat world that don’t typify higher education.  One flattening force – in Friedman’s sequence, one that is fundamental and antecedent to uploading and community-developed software – is workflow software.  This is software that allows geographically disparate individuals and teams to collaborate on the production and delivery of an entire product or service.  In higher education, while most online institutions and programs utilize a series of systems that permit collaboration at a distance for many functions, these systems aren’t fully integrated and don’t span the entire value chain (e.g., program and course development).  The absence of pervasive workflow software in higher education explains the other three missing forces:  outsourcing, offshoring and supply chaining.  While Antioch’s recent announcement that it would license Coursera MOOCs and incorporate them into its programs is an example of outsourcing and supply chaining, the attention the announcement received only illustrates how odd and rare the arrangement is.

So according to Friedman’s definition, the university is not flat.  Not even close.

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“We often forget that the software industry started out like a bad fire department.  Imagine a city where every neighborhood had a different interface for connecting the fire hose to the hydrant.  Everything was fine as long as your neighborhood’s fire department could handle your fire. But when a fire became too big and the fire engines from the next neighborhood had to be called in, they were useless because they could not connect their hoses to your hydrants.”     - Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat