Disruptive Innovation
- By Geoffrey H. Fletcher
- 09/01/09
Technology may push colleges and universities to turn
the conventional education model on its head.
In July, 65 technology executives from
campuses across the country gathered
just prior to the Campus Technology
2009 conference in Boston to
discuss the topic "IT Leadership and the
21st Century Campus: Insight and Innovation."
Through a jam-packed day of
highly interactive panels, culminating in
small group sessions, these IT leaders
wrestled with some pretty lofty-- and
knotty-- issues.
I particularly enjoyed the group discussions
that were teed up by Chris
Dede of the Harvard Graduate School
of Education (MA) talking about the
works of his Harvard colleague Clayton
Christensen-- The Innovator's Dilemma
and The Innovator's Solution-- as well
as Christensen's latest, Disrupting
Class, which applies the principles from
the two Innovator books to education.
Christensen's premise is that most companies
(and institutions) do little to
encourage innovation on a grand scale,
and instead focus on "sustaining innovations"--
that is, innovations that keep the
product or service going, but only create
incremental improvements in it.
Disruptive innovations, Dede said,
offer a new product that initially may not
be as effective as what is currently sold
to a broad audience, but meets an
immediate specialized need of a smaller
audience. Over time, the disruptive
product is more nimble and responsive
and evolves more quickly to meet the
needs of a broader audience. Ultimately
the disruptive innovation can drive out
the standard product.
Applying these principles to education,
Dede asserted that schooling (and
by that he meant formal, institutionalized
education based on the industrial
model) is the sustaining innovation-- it
keeps going and a few refinements or
fads incrementally improve it, but
change is really on the edge of the entire
institution. The disruptive innovation in
education is customization, Dede said.
The most prevalent form of customization
in higher education is online learning,
but as students demand more and
more customization, as they are used to
with Web 2.0 tools, Amazon, and other
services, higher education has come
under siege. While Dede did not mention
this, to me private for-profit institutions
are a good example of this siege, in
that they are offering services and programs
that initially catered to a small,
niche audience, but now are being used
by students of all kinds.
After this backdrop from Dede, the
IT leaders broke into small groups to
discuss three provocative questions:
- Do you concur that the conventional
model of higher education is
under siege in terms of cost, quality of
preparation, and proportion of students
who graduate?
- Are efforts to customize/personalize
learning for students underway on
your campus?
- In the next few years, do you
intend to make substantial strategic
investments in this type of technology?
The short answers to these questions
were dishearteningly honest: Yes, higher
education is under siege; the efforts
to customize/personalize learning are
occurring in some campuses, but only in
isolated pockets; and there isn't much
going on in the way of investment in
technology that would help.
How would you answer those three
questions? Send me your thoughts at
[email protected].
--Geoff Fletcher, Editorial Director
We want to hear from you! E-mail us at
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About the Author
Geoffrey H. Fletcher is the deputy executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA).