The classroom of the future is not a fixed blueprint. Just like a record producer in 1974 could barely imagine the world of music in 2014, so the future of education is one which will look little as it does now, evolving and morphing along with the needs of the students and the advances in technology. Handled thoughtfully, this constant growth in technology can help create a better classroom where teachers have the tools they need to better serve students of every style and pace, regardless of where they might physically reside.
If schools are to evolve rather than decay, nimble planning and constant vigilance is required to ensure antiquated policies and rusting technology doesn’t inhibit meaningful growth. This message was at the heart of our friend Clay Christensen’s seminal and prescient book, Disrupting Class, arguing that due to advances in technology, traditional systems of education were ripe for “disruption,” reshaping the very form and structure of the education experience. One key point made by Christensen about this disruption was that it largely occurs in areas of non-consumption, such as in the field of micro-computers, developing in small ways before finally upending the larger established systems. This incremental and slower growth still holds true for many areas of technology and society, but as Silicon Valley continues to innovate at an exponential rate, the idea of slow disruption seems to lack something.
A new book from Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, Big-Bang Disruption tackles the other side of disruption, what happens when disruption seems to happen literally overnight?
Disruption is the New Normal in the Wall Street Journal provides a good overview of the book, highlighting what this sort of tectonic disruption has done to the stand-alone GPS makers.
A generation ago, the Rand McNally atlas was the state of the art in navigation. Then Garmin, TomTom and other innovators developed satellite-based GPS devices. But barely a decade later, Google added constantly updated navigation to its maps and made them easily accessible as an app on mobile phones for the unbeatable price point of zero. The market value of stand-alone GPS makers fell as much as 85%.
Two things drive these changes. One is the new ability of companies to innovate and grow, collapsing the cycle of product development. The second is the increasing power of consumers to drive disruptive innovation from the bottom up. This creates rapid markets and rapid changes, seemingly overnight.
Big-Bang Disruption fleshes out this new normal in the Harvard Business Review,
Users made the switch in a matter of weeks. And it wasn’t just the least profitable or “underserved” customers who were lured away. Consumers in every segment defected simultaneously—and in droves…In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, internet fads (or “memes”) can infect the whole world in a matter of days. Products can, too. An ad-supported version of the game Angry Birds was downloaded over a million times in the first 24 hours it was available on Android devices. (That number might have been even higher had the enthusiastic response not crashed the developer’s servers.) Seven months later the game had been downloaded more than 200 million times.
There is a catch though. Many industries have protected themselves for disruption behind a wall of regulations, policies, and laws. We talked about this in August after picking up on former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s oped on state regulators being the new battleground for innovation. Regulators are preventing services like Uber from competing with Taxis. Consumers are pushing back and demanding the flexibility these new options offer.
That has led Downes and Nunes to conclude consumer demand will force changes in heavily regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals and energy as well as for services like education. Policy matters. Unless policymakers modernize regulations, they will be reinforcing barriers to new models of learning, new instructional models leveraging blended learning, and new solutions for students and teachers. Downes and Nunes detail the strategies and new economics which have driven the market to this place, but they also provide useful advice for planning to survive and thrive during this era of “big-bang disruption.”
Forward-thinking legislators and educators would do well to think carefully about what areas of large-scale inefficiency still exist in most classrooms and education systems across the United States. Those normal ways of doing things, whether that be seat time or course selection, may soon seem antiquated to the consumers in education, the parents and students and this theory teaches that as those consumers start to clamor for alternatives, disruption is simmering away. Current disruption has already impacted public education, says Downes and Nunes,”exposing just how little our public institutions have invested in technology that visibly advances their core teaching mission.”
As Governors prepare to deliver speeches detailing their plans for the next year, they must consider how their investments in digital learning, whether that be in infrastructure, resources or professional development, truly advance the future needs of the students and don’t just fine tune and tweak aging systems. New models of funding can help ensure that public investment in education fuels innovation and disruption rather than stifles it. The Straight A Innovation Fund in Ohio is a great example of a bold way of encouraging new models of learning. Our Smart Series paper on Funding is an excellent resource in thinking through new ways of structuring funding.