Disrupting College. New report by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera addresses the challenges faced by our education industry, where disruptive innovation is likely to occur, and offers approaches for existing institutions to adopt. Analysis is spot on.
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It takes a crisis to motivate change. Online learning for instance is a start, but the field of just-in-time instruction is lagging. The DoD attempts this through technologies like SCORM, but that standard has been extremely difficult to implement well enough to be worthwhile.
Something much more lightweight would be in order, and maybe the mismatch between training and demand is going to force us to finally get serious with learning management systems… had some hopes from Facebook’s grants to Newark NJ, but no word out yet about education technologies AFAIK.
Did you ever read the article “College for $99 a month” in the Washington Monthly? I don’t necessarily believe the innovation will come from the incumbents; rather, they’re more entrenched than companies usually are in their industry. One opportunity for startups is to offer a higher-quality education at lower cost and undercut universities’ traditional cash cows: the 220-person undergraduate lecture course. Technology has an enabling role in all of this.
Lecture halls do have benefits, such as the formation of communities around each course that are hard to achieve in an online format, for instance. But technology can sure do a whole lot more than what the combination of Blackboard and PowerPoint currently achieve.