Too many looming problems are no one office or department's business, or they're the business of too many offices. These and other such challenges are serious. Nonetheless, we do not know whether the Third Revolution will be good for most learners and scholars, or disastrous. It may be affordable or it may bankrupt us. It may enrich education or eviscerate it.
Evaluation becomes more critical in such a period of turbulent change.
We are less likely to make real progress if we don't take time to see what we've just done and where we're going. The Flashlight Program is working to provide tools and training for institutions and instructors that want to take a hard look at just what is going on in their programs. Those institutions, and thousands of others like them, are no longer quite so stable. They are in the early stages of a profound transformation. There is no King of Education who will determine what that transformation will bring.