Clayton Christensen's Disrupting Class and The Innovative University - Takeaways

A Visit to UC San Marcos

Knowing of my interest in pursuing topics related to disruptive technologies, Jeff was kind enough to invite me along to his Saturday doctoral class session at UC San Marcos today. The group was comprised of mostly educators from either K-12 or higher education.  It was a day devoted to presentations on Clayton Christiansen's books entitled: Disrupting Class and the other: The Innovative University.

Disrupting Class - Insights and Take-aways

In Disrupting Class, Christensen points out that many issues in American education can be traced back to the focus on mass education as a form of production.  A machinelike metaphor, where students heads are filled with information, and assessed in exactly the same way and, whether students score highly on standardized tests or score poorly, like quality assurance in a factory production line,  the "products" are moved along at the same pace to the next stage (or grade in this case). All students are taught in the same way, regardless of their preferred learning styles. 

• Disruptive technologies begin their life as expensive and unreliable, but address the shortcomings of the dominant system in place. Later they supplant the dominant system as they become inexpensive & reliable.
• While learning does take place in the standard model, content that is learned  should be recognized of course, but it's the content which isn't learned that should receive the focus of resources.
• Assessment should be measured by the breadth of knowledge, not just the uncritical relaying of facts.
• Really liked Jeff's observation that "If you can find it using Google, it isn't an assessment of learning."
• Short-term change: Upon incorrect answers, quizzes should do more than say "Incorrect." They should do more than point students to the same information that produced the mistake, they should instead provide alternative explanations using a variety of learning styles.

The Innovative University - Insights and Take-aways:

Everett Rogers' Technology Adoption Lifecycle was reconstituted and applied to organizational change. It traces the life cycle of an organization from inception, to growth to maturity to decline. If organizations wish to continue to perform well, they must be aware of threats of disruptive change to stave-off decline. With rising tuition, increasing demand and reduced class availability, institutions of higher education are ripe for disruption.

• Part of the reason for increased costs are the perceived need by institutions to match the facilities and class offerings provided by competitors. This concept includes athletics.

• My take on this is that a prudent step form many universities is to offer hybrid classes where students meet for face-to-face meetings twice or three times per semester, with the remainder of the classes being held online - to include faculty office hours. Universities could trim facilities, while using them more effectively by investing in desks that are easily moved to new configurations to encourage collaborations. Eventually facilities can be replicated within immersive reality (the quality will be like that of ultra-realistic video gaming environments) where students have avatars that can interact "live" with one another within educational environments that can be changed to fit the topic being discussed. To make this work there would need to be cooperation between the manufacturer of online gaming environments along with provider such as OnLive that streams environments to users computers/devices.
• One idea for distance learning: Increase collaboration between students by having students read and grade and another student's paper. The paper is also graded by the instructor and each reviewer receives a grade for his/her contribution to the paper. The result is a more in-depth and critically-based collaboration between students than what otherwise would be the case.

I'm glad I had this opportunity to learn more about disruptive technologies and have some time to consider how it might be applied to learning within higher education. As others have pointed out, mankind has solved most of the problems, the low hanging fruit, that can be solved by applying the some of the best minds available today. The other, more complex, problems seem to be just out of reach. By applying the critical thinking skills that we need to employ, combined with the creative use of exponentially improving technologies, we will have the leverage for us to reach higher and solve those seemly intractable problems that hover just beyond our reach.