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Is Education Disrupted?

Today, the hegemony of formal education’s traditional business model is being challenged.  Macro trends in employment, technological advances and the inability for our legacy educational systems to maintain pace with an unprecedented global demand for learning have fueled a renaissance in educational entrepreneurship and innovation that are sure to change the way we think about education and learning.

Education’s Challenge – Meeting the Demand

It’s no secret that there is a large unmet demand worldwide for higher education, or the demand for what education represents in the form of marketable credentials. These credentials are still associated with higher levels of prosperity and a wider range of job opportunities. Unfortunately costs for obtaining a university degree have risen to levels either economically challenging, or out of reach for much of the world’s population. For many fortunate enough to have access to advanced education, the new reality means incurring high debt in order to pay for an education that continues to rise in cost while government tuition subsidies continue to decline.  In the United States, total student debt is now in excess of a trillion dollars according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Our educational institutions are said to suffer from Baumol’s cost disease described by the eponymous economist as a condition in which the costs of labor intensive industries such as higher education   continue to rise without any increase in labor productivity resulting from automation or technical advances in response.  As Mark Taylor, Dean of the Warwick Business School, more bluntly stated “seminars and lectures are medieval concepts. They were introduced in medieval Europe and haven’t changed much in 700 or 800 years.”

The New Logic of Work

Compounding these forces, the very nature of work is changing as a result of technical innovation, and forms of artificial intelligence.   A study by Oxford University professors Carl Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013 of 702 U.S. occupations determined that about 47 percent of total U.S. employment is has high probable risk of computer automation.

 Formal education in the postindustrial age has enjoyed a seemingly unassailable level of comfort, focused on producing what Peter Drucker termed “knowledge workers”.  Each worker was fully equipped with a body of knowledge suitable for a lifetime career in their chosen field, often with the same employer.  In the new economy however, labour analysts predict that workers can expect to change careers 10 to 15 times over the course of their lives as a result of labour markets influenced by technical advances, the increasingly short shelf life of knowledge as well as our increased longevity that will keep many of us engaged in encore careers beyond the age of 65.

Druker’s description of the knowledge economy now seems too static.  Learning thought- leader Jeff Thomas Cobb  of author of Leading Learning states “we now live in what is not so much a ‘knowledge economy’ but rather a ‘figure it out on a daily basis’ economy. Or, more formally, a learning economy”.

Recipe for Disruption

The macro forces of our changing workplace, combined the formal learning institutions inability to scale their business model to prepare or retrain students for the 21st century workplace creates an opportunity for what Clayton Christiansen, author of the Innovators Dilemma (Christiansen, 1997), calls “disruptive innovation.”

According to Christiansen, “disruptive innovations:”

• focus on the needs of  non-consumers (for example, those that don’t have the time, money or qualifications or access to pursue formal education)
• offer a simpler product with lower costs, fewer features or lower quality that at first do not appear to be competitive
• establish a strong position in these markets
• consistently improve their offering to the point of overtaking the established firms or institutions focused on merely sustaining their own markets.

A Disruptive Force

Perhaps the most prominent example of a disruptive innovation in education that is meeting Christensen’s criteria is the massive open online course (MOOC). The genesis of the MOOC came out of the open education resources movement (OER) in which Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) notably provided free access to their course materials to anyone. This philosophy inspired a group of adjunct professors at Stanford University to launch a computer science MOOC in 2011 that reached 160,000 students. On the heels of this success, its organizers established MOOC startups Coursera and Udacity which now claim over 10 million and 1.6 million registered users respectively. Less known as a brand name but no less successful than its U.S. counterparts U.K-based ALISON Learning – considered by some to be the first substantial MOOC provider (offering courses as early as 2007) was also rapidly finding a demand for open learning.  ALISON recently surpassed 3 million registered users, and is profitable offering free classes to largely underserved markets funded by advertising revenue.

In addition to their free or low pricing and scale, MOOCS also stray from traditional delivery of education through participatory or “connected learning” social features such as wikis, blogs that allow exchange among peers and instructors that can often continue beyond the termination of the course.

Early research on the effectiveness of MOOCs has been mixed.  However, given the significant investment, the proliferation of providers and the institutional forces behind them, it seems likely they will continue to co-evolve in collaborative synergy with both formal education institutions as well as the corporate learning environment. MOOC providers are establishing their disruptive beachheads supplying learning to enormous populations of non-consumers traditionally denied through constraints of access, cost and convenience.

In whatever direction they evolve – Social, collaborative and co-creation features on a massive scale, when combined with the vast amount of accessible information, are supercharging a new learning revolution. Education is transitioning from teaching to learning, from passive to active and formal to informal. The web’s capacity to free learning has created a disruptive environment in which fosters personalized, self-directed learning at the speed more commensurate with technological and societal change.

Categorized in: Industry News