Disrupting Class

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and purveyor of the prevailing theories of disruption, has finally applied these powerful theories to the topic of public education in the US. If any sector of our society is desperately in need of disruption, it is public education and the satellite industries that have emerged over the past 100+ years to support it, particularly the textbook publishing industry.

The theory of disruption states that technologies will be deployed in a sustaining way by incumbents in the industry who have an interest in keeping the primary value proposition, and the underlying economic model, intact. After all, these companies have invested, sometimes enormous amounts of capital, in building their infrastructure for creating, delivering and maintaining their value proposition.

Other enterprises will use technology in a disruptive way. The disruption will be an economic one – the fundamental value proposition will change, and with it the underlying economic model too. The change is often manifest in the creation of consumption among populations who have not been able to consume before. Christensen speaks of jobs that consumers hire products to do. The disruption, then, occurs when a technology is deployed in such a way as to allow consumers to get jobs done that were either too difficult and/or expensive to do before. Interestingly (and a concept often misunderstood by casual readers of Christensen), the disruptive technology is almost never the latest, greatest technology. It is often technology deemed to be insufficient to accomplish the job performed by incumbent products, and so frequently overlooked by the marketplace until the new job it enables emerges. In his early writing, Christensen used the shrinking disk-drive technology as a classic illustration of disruption.

Rather than go into a full review of Disrupting Class, let me invite you to read it for yourself and participate in the active blogs about this important book (see for example techlearning, and Learning Technology). Instead, I’d like to make the following observations specific to the textbook industry that so dominates the category of instructional materials:

The textbook publishing industry: A necessary sub-disruption to the grand disruption
The textbook industry seems almost a comically apt case of an industry badly in need of disruption. At the beginning of the 21st century the industry is still focused almost exclusively on monolithic value propositions, on deployments of technology that require extensive buy-in and training for successful deployment, and on an ever increasing glut of features in the current base value proposition, with adoption packages famous for their “everything plus the kitchen sink” approach. Web pages, DVD-ROMs, wall posters, teacher guides, textbooks, workbooks, consumables, manipulatives.

The industry, despite many loud objections to the contrary, is pursuing a non-innovative, sustaining approach to building value. Pearson’s California Social Studies and their enVisionMath programs are but two examples of programs touted for their innovative design or distribution, but which at the end of the day do not allow any new jobs to be performed.

To the veterans of three decades of instructional technology disappointment, keep the faith
In Disrupting Class Christensen highlights the proper deployment of technology in the classroom as an opportunity to accomplish a job that hasn’t been possible to date – the customization of learning to the styles and needs of each individual student. This has been met by veterans in the instructional technology efforts underway since the late 1970s with a resounding “Yes, we’ve heard this all for over 30 years and nothing seems to change.” I hope these veterans will recognize that the difficult change that has been coming via technology will take more time and more critical mass than has been created to date. So far, technology has not been deployed in such a way as to facilitate the performance of new jobs. Hint: customization will simultaneously empower teachers and automate many of the tasks of evaluating students, selecting content and learning experiences, and monitoring progress.

The missing link: Emergence
One of the fundamental features of properly deployed technology that I believe Christensen and co-authors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson missed in the book is emergence. Highly connected deployments of technology with sufficient data gathering and analyzing capability should be able to deliver to teachers, parents and students in the educational context what Amazon delivers to shoppers and iTunes delivers to music lovers and NetFlix delivers to movie watchers – pattern matching to enhance decision making and influence behaviors. The web as a mechanism for identifying and making useful emergent behaviors cannot be underestimated as a powerful (and perhaps necessary) tool for accomplishing the disruption imagined by the authors. To be fair, they do identify social networks as an important trend, but they fall into the trap of overestimating the willingness of a population to become authors, or the value of existing content placed into the context of a social network (through remixes, usage patterns, etc.).

Underestimating the need to reform educational regulation
The authors also give short shrift to the necessity of overhauling the state-wide adoption process. They equate education with other regulated industries, using the example of Southwest airlines figuring out how to operate in a different manner under a heavily regulated airline industry. However airlines and other historically regulated industries are different from public education in one very critical aspect – public education not only regulates the behavior of various parties, it also controls almost 100% of the funding. In other countries (India and China to select two salient examples) there is a substantial societal expectation that high quality education will only come by parents participating as direct consumers in the marketplace. In other words, there is an established pattern of private money funding a large variety of educational activities within these societies. The result is that it is easier by an order of magnitude to innovate and utilize traditional marketplace mechanisms in these circumstances.

An example of how powerful this can be can be seen in Educomp, the rapidly growing Indian education technology company (and also a Learning.com investor). Starting by providing turn-key instructional technology solutions to private schools in India, the company has rapidly innovated beyond this original offering, taking similar products to public schools, offering tutoring and math help tools online, launching their own brand of brick-and-mortal private school, etc. It is interesting to note that the US is the highly regulated, innovation-suppressing market in education, and places like China are the hotbeds of innovation and entrepreneurship.

More focus on entrepreneurship, please
Finally, just a reiteration of the role of enterprise formation and bringing true innovations to the marketplace in education: Disrupting Class envisions a world in which technology facilitates teachers’ ability to address every student individually. The only way this future will become a reality is if the private sector is able to bring the necessary tools to market and gain sufficient critical mass to be able to continually innovate with these tools. Philanthropy and government projects will not yield game-changing, disruptive products and services necessary for the bigger disruption of the prevailing educational paradigm to occur. In the conclusion to the book the authors do encourage entrepreneurs that “[i]nvesting in technological platforms … will have extraordinary impact. … Funding the development of these platforms and the user networks within with these learning tools can be exchanged will be financially rewarding …” But very little about the book (or Christensen’s body of writing in general) is directed at, or overtly prescriptive of, the specific steps entrepreneurs need to take, or the steps various players (regulators, legislators, customers, etc.) need to take in order to enable a more fertile entrepreneurial environment. More needs to be written and done about this in order for the vision of Christensen, and the generations of believers in the transformative power of instructional technology before him, to be realized.

Bottom line for me: this is a must-read book. They got a lot of the analysis right. They posed questions and challenges that will no doubt flummox those whose interests are aligned with the status quo in education. Much more discussion and action is required in order to address these issues. But throughout the book Christensen et al offer an incredibly optimistic view of how education can (and will) be transformed.

Long live the disruption!

Oregon K-6 Math Adoption 2008

In perhaps a fit of irrationality, or hubris, or creative genius, depending on your perspective and the time of day, Learning.com recently attempted to get a completely online-delivered K-6 math program adopted in the State of Oregon.

(For background information on this adoption, please follow this link. For interesting overviews of state adoptions in general, you can read my previous post "The Future of Instructional Materials", and view the presentation I gave last year at EdNet in Chicago. You can also check out interesting critiques of the adoption process by searching for anything by Diane Ravitch, including the Fordham Institutes "Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoptions" published back in 2005, which includes an introduction by Ravitch. Ravitch has also authored a book on the subject, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn" also available in a Kindle version.)

I'll leave a more profound and philosophical discussion of textbook adoptions to others -- for now, my subject is our particular experience in trying to get our online math curriculum adopted by the State of Oregon.

The state had published its guidelines for this adoption, so the criteria we were going to be judged by were clear. The educational guidelines included 17 criteria, for which we would receive a score from 0-10. The scores on the 17 criteria would be totalled up and if we received an 80% score (i.e. 136 points out of a possible 170) we would be adopted and invited onto the state's "caravan" of adopted mathematics materials from which districts could select their chosen materials.

At this point I'd like to comment, in case you're wondering, that the adoption process is the gateway to $4.3 billion worth of annual business for publishers. The process is difficult, bureaucratic, arcane, and logistically nightmarish. These two factors -- the size and the complexity of the adoption process -- have driven the publishing industry to consolidate to three primary players -- Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton-Mifflin/Harcourt, only one of which is a US-based company (McGraw-Hill). So for a company the size of Learning.com to go after a prize so clearly in the realm of the multi-billion-dollar publishers could be viewed as a little nutty, or very brave indeed.

Back to the story. We spent our time preparing for the review by adding curriculum to our offering (fortunately, our platform allows us to rapidly deploy any kind of modular digital content, so adding content from third party sources is very easy). We licensed some additional content and created a compelling (in our opinion) presentation of a very flexible and complete course of study.

When we got to the review, we were graded down on items like Spanish language support and the availability of manipulatives (two factors we knew we were weak on). We were also graded down on presenting the material with a Lexile score (even though we had worked with the folks at MetaMetrix and they had written us a letter saying they didn't know how to provide a Lexile score for interactive content). So going in we were already down 30 points, leaving us very little margin for error.

The next feedback we got was that the panel felt our program would be too infrastructure intensive and require too much training for teachers to effectively use. This was actually incredibly valuable feedback and has led to a lot of additional ideas within our company. The panel also noted that we didn't really address differentiated learning very effectively, which struck us as an unfortunate oversight on their part. Our platform is built to differentiate all the way down to the individual student, and to address each student through the combination of linear instruction, engaging interactivity, individual and group projects and game play that suits them best. However, we took the feedback as a challenge to more effectively present the value of our solution.

At the end of the day, we missed being adopted by about 8 percentage points, or a total of 14 points. We would have preferred to be adopted, but going through the experience helped us learn a lot:

• We can deliver a curriculum that meets state standards (no one on the panel questioned our coverage of standards)
• We have a lot of work to do to present our solution as the easy-to-use solution that it really is.
  
• We need to reach out to additional third party suppliers for things like manipulatives and multiple language support.

We also learned some not so pleasant things. Despite providing log-in credentials for all members of the review panel -- 14 in all -- only 4 people actually logged on to the Learning.com site and review the material. Also, there was a palpable reticence on the part of the educators on the panel to consider dramatically different forms of delivery for instructional materials, and different instructional methods implied by the delivery mechanism. These things are troubling.

Nothing in this experience has changed my mind that the adoption process represents an overly bureaucratic, unnecessarily rigid barrier to innovation in the core areas of instructional materials. I can't help but believe that education could be dramatically improved if we were to dramatically overhaul the process by which instructional materials are selected and used by schools. And if we found a mechanism for accountability for decisions that are made by state and district review panels.

Until that reform comes, we'll continue to chip away at the process. Next year there are interesting adoptions in Florida and Alabama. We plan to be there.

Back to School Night

I recently went to "back to school" night at my daughter's middle school. She's in seventh grade, the second year of multiple classes with multiple teachers. This middle school seems to take it's work ethic very seriously -- every teacher believes they are preparing their students for success in high school by giving consistent nightly homework. It is literally the case that my daughter spends anywhere from 2-4 hours per night performing homework. Much of this work I would characterize as "logistics" (i.e. collecting, sorting, stapling, figuring out how to get a piece of writing to show up on the worksheet given out by the teacher) or "busywork" (i.e. repeated exercises on worksheets, fill-in the blank questions, etc.).

During this "back to school" night, we parents followed our children's schedules for seven minute meetings with each teacher. One of the teachers that my daughter has told us that while she will post the homework assignment on her web page, she won't post the actually worksheet or reading material, because she wants her students to "learn responsibility."

The further away from that moment I get, the more it drives me crazy. Responsibility? I imagine that this teacher thinks that she is doing the business world a favor by drilling into her students that they must protect and keep track of her precious worksheets. But the fact is, as an employer, I don't really care if my employees can keep track of individual pieces of paper. I care that they can perform the tasks associated with the documents they deal with. And I trust that in this age of digital communications, they will figure out how best to deal with the documents they need.

It is often the case that my employees will ask for a document to be emailed to them, or to be made available on a common storage server on our network. By accommodating my employees in this way I accept that there are better ways to do things than by photocopying one per employee and expecting them to keep track of it.

For a seventh grade teacher to assume that the skill of keeping track of a piece of paper is more important than the work that is associated with that piece of paper is really ridiculous. I hope that it is a reflection of her mistaken understanding of what "responsibility" means in the real world, and not just a cynical mechanism to establish and maintain power over helpless students.