Disruptive Innovation:  Traditional Education Provides Targets of Opportunity

Can disruption in the classroom be a good thing?  Perhaps.  Clayton Christensen and Michael  Horn have zeroed in the impact of computers in education in a new book, Disrupting Class:  How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.  Take the K-12 crowd.  Despite all the push to get technology into the classroom, the authors maintain that computers have been a bit of a dud.  Rather than transform how students learn, information technology has merely paved the educational cow path.

“If Rip Van Winkle fell asleep 100 years ago and woke up today and walked into a classroom, he would recognize the classroom…it would not look too different,” says Horn. 

Horn, a Harvard MBA and executive director, education, of Innosight Institute, says even with computers in place, classroom interactions don’t look much different in terms of processes.  Teachers, not computers, deliver the actual learning.

“Computers are used as a tool to advance processes that were already in place,” Horn says.

In effect, computers are ineffective where students are but could be effective where students are not.

Sound confusing?  Not when one becomes familiar with disruptive innovation theory and the practice of non-consumption.  The former suggests that technology advances at a rate much faster than users can absorb it.  Some technology innovations help market leaders, in this case schools, sustain their operations.  Applied in this way, for better or worse, the new technology fits within a well understood learning trajectory.  Disruptive innovations do not sustain market leaders; in fact, because they are so new and different, they have no customers and no place in the existing process.  Instead, disruptive innovations find  acceptance among non-consumers in markets yet to bloom. 

“Computers have been implemented in a sustaining way,” Horn says.  “If we wanted to truly change the way learning and instruction happens, we think [computers] have the potential to be implemented in a disruptive way, which can fundamentally change the processes by which we learn.  That will never happen if we do it within the existing classroom because it will always get co-opted into the processes in place.  So the key is to target areas of non-consumption—where the alternative is literally nothing at all.  If you use computers in that manner…you can truly change the processes by which a student learns.”

In the educational arena, there’s plenty of non-consumption to go around.  Take the issue of credit recovery, otherwise known as teachers attempting to deal with students who fail a test or flunk a course.  Schools have little bandwidth for taking corrective action, but computers have plenty.  Rather than let the failing grade stand, Horn suggests that computers can be used to transform the credit recovery process.

Advanced placement courses are another rich area of non-consumption.  Under a business as usual approach to education, zip codes matter.  According to Department of Education statistics, only 22 percent of high schools across the country offer four or more advanced classes like physics or calculus.  Thus, when it comes to building a high octane high school transcript, it’s all about location, location, location.

“There are 34 advanced placement courses that a school could offer but in reality they can only offer a fraction of them.  So students looking for those tracks…this is sort of a delight for them…Twenty-five percent of schools do not offer advanced courses.  Trigonometry is unheard of.  For these schools online learning has been a blessing.”

Perhaps high school drop outs are the ultimate education non-consumers.  A more disruptive use of computers could also help this group—which runs upwards of 50 percent of students in several metropolitan areas and among minorities—to get a high school diploma and to get back on a path to higher learning and career achievement.   

“Drop outs are a huge area,” Horn says.  “I think what you are beginning to see is companies like Apex Learning going in and helping alternative high schools…the people we need this more for are the people who have not been able to get along in the traditional system and need alternative ways of learning.”

Ironically, Horn suggests that disruptive technologies in this area will get better as they evolve to support less academically motivated students.

“One of the hallmarks of disruptive innovation is that something starts at the simplest end and begins to get better and better.  It is true that a lot of the software out there now works better for the more motivated students.  As it gets that foothold by competing against nothing at all, it is motivated to improve…to become richer and more engaging and grab in more students.”

Horn says it is critical to understand that, despite the disruption of computers in the traditional learning process, the teacher remains in the equation but with a role that changes to more of a mentor and motivator, assuring that the student remains on task and engaged.

Still, viewing opportunity from the non-consumer’s point of view can be somewhat contagious.  For instance, one predictor of access to higher education is one’s rung on the economic ladder:  the closer to the top, the better one’s chances of a degree.  Access to more competitive courses is one advantage for top rung students.  Yet computers can be a great equalizer.  For instance, more affluent students often receive the academic tutoring and related supports in high school that less affluent students do without.

Horn maintains that better use of computers would give lower income students access to tutoring once the exclusive domain of the well to do.  “All of a sudden you increase the one on one interactions…in a really exciting way.”

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