What I learned from The Innovative University, Part 3: Relevance to professional and continuing education

My 3rd of 3 posts on The Innovative University: most continuing and professional education divisions within universities already practice many elements of the “disruptive model” of higher education described by authors Christensen and Eyring: Some of these include:

• Full year-round operation
• Modular programs that build upon each other
• Online courses and degrees
• Higher compensation and term contracts for faculty
• Broader definition of faculty scholarship and teaching emphasis
• Metrics related to desired outcomes (e.g. graduation rates, cost per student)
• Increased enrollments and access
• Reduced campus amenities
• Lower cost

Some additional components of innovative DNA among continuing and professional education divisions include:

• Variety of programs, including non-degree certificates
• High access/open enrollment
• Financial accountability and transparency due to high degree of financial self-support
• Relevance and connection to regional workforce needs
• Innovation in terms of program, format and business processes
• Partnering and outsourcing expertise
• Faculty development
• Agility

There’s a lot that continuing and professional higher education leaders can contribute to a conversation about such “disruptive” ideas as accountability, quality, access, relevance, and affordability in higher education. I hope they are brought to the table.

Or seen another way, given that the continuing and professional education  units have integrated these practices all along, the practices may not be quite as disruptive as initially thought. Some part of higher education have been incorporating these practices all along.

 

What I learned from The Innovative University, Part 2: Traditional and disruptive models

Continuing my thoughts from my last post on The Innovative University, Christensen and Eyring thoroughly describe the history and development of two very different private institutions: Harvard University and Brigham Young University (BYU)-Idaho (formerly Ricks College).

According to the authors, Harvard University has hands down become the traditional model for most of higher education. BYU-Idaho has become a recognized innovator, offering a disruptive model of higher education.

First, what is “disruption”?

Based on Christensen’s research in a number of fields, disruption occurs under two major conditions: “growth in the number of would-be consumers who cannot afford the continuously enhanced offerings [in a given product segment] and thus become non-consumers. [And] the emergence of technologies that will, in the right hands, allow new competitors to serve this disenfranchised group of non-consumers” (p. 16)   Classic examples include transistors that entered the market through cheap radios and personal computers that got their start through a low-end, amateur market segment. Both technologies eventually came to dominate their respective markets.

Circling back to higher education, Christensen and Eyring proposed the following elements they believe define the traditional model of higher education(e.g. “Harvard model”) adhered to or emulated by most postsecondary institutions (p. 136):

• Face-to-face instruction
• Specialization/departmentalization
• Long summer recess
• Graduate program dominance
• Private fundraising
• Competitive athletics
• General education and majors
• Academic honors
• Tenure and rank for faculty
• Admission selectivity

Specialization, selectivity, and many extracurricular amenities contribute to high cost. As institutions seek to move up the higher education classification system (e.g., community colleges that begin to offer four-year degrees or regional comprehensive institutions that strive to become research universities), costs continue to increase.

In conrast, some elements of Christensen’s and Eyring’s “disruptive model” of higher education include (p. 308, 322): 

• Full year-round operation
• Modular majors
• Online courses and degrees
• Higher compensation and term contracts for faculty
• Broader definition of faculty scholarship with teaching emphasis
• Metrics related to desired outcomes (e.g. graduation rates, cost per student)
• Increased enrollments and access
• Reduced campus amenities
• Lower cost

 These elements have been integrated at BYU-Idaho with positive results. (We should acknowledge that BYU-Idaho is owned by a large religious institution that can dictate changes to a large degree. It may be more challenging to fully implement these ideas elsewhere.)

Some of us may recognize many of these elements exist in programs offered by for-profit educational institutions. These providers serve formerly non-consumers of higher education, adults who were not able to access traditional higher education for one reason or another. Disruptive innovation in action. (With recent scrutiny and negative reports of many for-profit institutions, unfortunately many of these elements may become suspect in and of themselves.)

 I do not believe it’s an either/or formula: traditional or disruptive.

 And “one size” does not necessarily fit each and every institution. Institutional diversity is a major strength of U.S. higher education and should continue.

 The main take home message from the book: In what ways might these two lists of elements foster a robust dialogue and offer tangible actions (taken as a whole or more likely in components) that could lead to high quality, high accessibility and holding the line or decreasing cost in higher education?

More to come in a future post.

What I will be reading: More “disruption”

Just as soon as I wrote a blog post about Clay Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class, Christensen and co-author Henry Eyring’s new book was released. It’s called The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out and the authors apply the same approach and some of the same ideas in Disrupting Class specifically to higher education. I saw a presentation on ideas in the book at the American Council on Education annual meeting back in March.

 Yes, I have ordered the book and look forward to reading it. Another blog post in my future?

 

What I’m reading: Disrupting Class

Over the past year or so, I had the honor of serving as an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow. ACE is the nation’s premier umbrella organization representing all sectors of higher education, and the fellowship is a sort of mid-career internship for higher education leaders.  During the year I made time to catch up on my reading. (My blog posts took somewhat of a backseat, you may have noticed.)

 One book I found particularly compelling was Disrupting Class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the work learns by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.  Christensen has written about innovation and disruptive technology in other industries. This book applies his theories to K-12 education. It’s a refreshing “outsiders” view.

 Christensen argues the current educational system is based on an industrial, mass production, assembly line model where we assume every student can master the same material in the same way. Christensen provides a compelling argument for a new disruptive model:

• Customized learning that adapts to an individual student’s pace and style of learning
• Student-centered classrooms that employ technology
• Teachers as facilitative “guides on the side”
• Students engaged in learning and feeling successful about their learning

 Christensen predicts that disruptive educational innovation may emerge in the form of grassroots online tutoring tools:  “ . . . these tools will spread in popularity very quickly, and exchanges will emerge through with this user-generated content can be offered to others for free or for a fee.” (p. 130)

Christensen draws an analogy to the pharmaceutical industry’s direct-to-patient advertising. Patients are doing their own web research about conditions and treatments and are “’pulling’ the solution from their doctors after they’ve made a preliminary diagnosis themselves” (p. 139).

 “The analogous case in education is that historically, because they haven’t known of the existence of remedies for learning problems, students and their families typically put up with poor grades and the low self-esteem spawned by feeling stupid. [New] facilitated networks will be designed to help students and their families diagnose why they’re finding it so difficult to master a subject and then find their own solution. Just as in health care, students and their families will not wait for their teaching professionals to prescribe a ‘therapy.’ They will pull the solution out of the facilitated network themselves” (p. 139).

 Eventually, the public will expect, even demand, similar solutions in the classroom.

 This very brief description just scratches the surface of the many insights in Disrupting Class. I recommend this book for anyone interested in educational reform.  (And who isn’t?)

Coping with Disruptive Technology by Dean Cathy Sandeen

I just finished reading what I consider to be a brilliant research paper, an observational study of normative student behavior in a university library by a third-year psychology student at University of California Irvine. (Full disclosure: the author of the paper is my daughter.) Her key conclusions? Even during one of the most academically demanding weeks of the term, students spend large amounts of their time in the library on non-academic activities: listening to music, responding to text or instant messages, non-academic surfing the internet, and viewing Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites.

These findings illustrate a trend that should be obvious to us all. Technology has altered the way we live, work, play, and learn. Moreover—and here’s the challenge—technology continues to evolve and change rapidly.

I just read an interesting article in the Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine, called Last Tech.  The article listed a large number of long-standing, highly-used inventions that have recently faded away. The typewriter, road map, drinking fountain, hotel room key, for example, have been replaced—as have the individuals who made, used, or repaired these various devices. 

Photo from Southwest Spirit magazine, March 2010

Clayton Christensen coined the phrase “disruptive innovation,” one new innovation that quickly displaces another.

Building on Christensen’s work, Scott McLeod has an interesting talk on Teaching and Learning in and Era of Disruptive Technology.  McLeod argues that today’s workforce requires a range of new skills and abilities, different from those required in the industrial era, as depicted in this graphic from his presentation. I agree. 

McLeod also offered the following slide illustrating how our current educational system is based on educating the workforce for the industrial age, not the digital and creative age.

It is a fundamental dilemma—not easily addressed. I am interested in your thoughts on this issue. How do we balance educating the workforce of the future within existing structure and institutions, preserving those elements of traditional education that have served us so well in the past?  Is educating a competitive workforce of the future a matter of adaptive change, or is revolutionary change needed?