Disruptive Innovation in Education

We often talk about how the current exponential advances in technology has brought about disruption in the academe and yet we fall short, if not fail, to actually suggest how might we be able to do just that.  This subject is the gist of the book entitled Disrupting Class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns by no other than the guru of disruptive innovation Clayton Christiansen as he teamed up with 2 educators Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson.

In the book, Christiansen, Horn & Johnson (2008)  outlined how the disruptive innovation model can be used to effect transformation in the schools.  The authors argued on the following points:

1. Utilize the disruptive potential of student-centric Information Technology.  The authors argued that IT can help us move towards a modular, not monolithic batch mode education system and to teach students in customized ways.
2. To not target courses or subjects that mainstream schools consider important and want to teach in-house. It must instead focus on courses that schools would be relieved not to have to teach, but would be happy to offer. (OPELEC?)
3. The mastery of concepts can be tested in an ongoing fashion. Rather than a fixed time for learning for all students with variable results, the amount of time to learn can vary across students.
4. Utilize social constructivist scaffolding through  “learners as teachers” and “teachers as learners” approach.  This might work because many of us learn better when we teach than when we listen to a teacher.  This is were Design Thinking can be used as a teaching-learning approach because radical multidisciplinary and multi-level (mentor-mentor, mentor-student and student-student) collaboration is its strength.

Christiansen recommends that for a disruptive innovation to succeed, we must focus on affordability, accessibility, capability and responsiveness.  Learner-centered educational technology learning management systems can therefore be leveraged because of its potential to lower cost of operations, flexibility and customizability.

Source: Christensen, C. M., Horn, M. B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns (Vol. 98). New York: McGraw-Hill.