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!