Clayton Christensen |

A proposed budget out of Washington State’s House and Ways Means Committee last week would have eliminated funding for the state’s Alternative Learning Experience (ALE) programs for students in K-6. Given that K-6 online public programs operate under ALE, if that had been enacted as proposed, they would all have been shut down.

After an outpouring of responses from families across the state that would have been affected, Representative Pat Sullivan stepped in and introduced an amendment that restored ALE and restored the supposed savings through cuts to transportation. The amendment passed unanimously. Good move.

I get that there is a budget crisis right now and that things need to be cut. I advocate for that in many cases. Although we might wish for more funding for everything, it is neither realistic nor a good idea.

But eliminating programs that have the potential to disrupt the traditional monolithic education system and be part of the wave that transforms the education system into a student-centric one isn’t smart. Online learning can be a way to transform the system into a lower cost one that saves the public money and gets better results—read Tom Vander Ark’s blog on the topic here and Governor Bob Wise and the Alliance for Excellent Education’s report on how online learning can help solve the shortage of quality teachers, improve student outcomes, and allow states to do more despite flat education budgets here.

Walking away from this opportunity and kicking out the homeschoolers who have joined public education in the last decade won’t cause this revolution to stop. It just means that the revolution would not have been under the auspices of the state of Washington’s public education system.

Online providers are innovating constantly in the private space to deliver affordable high-quality education. For example, in a list that’s growing nearly every day it seems, another online school of which I had not heard popped onto my radar recently. It’s called Advantages Online Private School, and it offers a full-year of schooling for tuition rates between $3,000 and $4,000.

Public systems will push out online learning only at their own peril—and to the detriment of their students. Perhaps we wouldn’t expect this not to be a struggle in the public landscape? After all, it’s hard to overcome the innovator’s dilemma and disrupt yourself. That doesn’t mean disruption won’t still happen or that ignoring it is a good idea. Washington’s public education system dodged a bullet here. To follow this storyline, you can check out these sites here and here.

One out of every 110 babies born in the United States today will be diagnosed with autism, according to the CDC, and the diagnosed incidences of autism over time have been increasing.

One of the evidenced-based interventions for autism is called Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), but there are few people certified in ABA so many families and school districts with autistic children do not have convenient access to a trained professional. In addition, when a professional is nearby, the service is costly—in the range of $100 an hour—so even more cannot access this service.

When we see a service that is too expensive, inconvenient, and centralized such that a large population cannot consume it, it’s an indication that it is a prime area awaiting a disruptive innovation.

Rethink Autism is attempting to pioneer such a disruptive solution—and it bears many of the classic traits of one. Profiling it helps to clarify the pattern that characterizes disruption.

In brief, the way Rethink Autism works is that a parent or adult fills out a skills checklist online, and Rethink Autism creates an individualized ABA-based plan for the child. That plan in essence guides the parent or teacher in what to do with the child and how to do it through the use of videos of experts demonstrating the interventions and so forth that break down complex tasks into short, easy-to-understand steps. As the child learns new skills, the platform adds new lessons to his or her curriculum and continues to customize over time. Much of the interventions are, of course, offline, but the platform is delivered in a child-centered way online. No expert is involved.

In essence, Rethink Autism does several things to allow nonconsumers the benefit of an ABA intervention. First, it commoditizes the expertise of trained ABA professionals and allows less-skilled people—parents and teachers and the like who are not trained ABA experts—to do ABA interventions. Sure, they aren’t as good as the experts, and the platform probably isn’t as good at customizing a curriculum for a child as an expert guided by rich intuition, but for the many autistic children who do not have access to those experts, this is far better than the alternative, which is nothing at all. And like all technologies, it will improve over time as it scales, just like transistors and personal computers did. As a result of commoditizing the professionals’ expertise, it’s also a lot more affordable than the traditional service. Instead of $100 an hour, it costs less than $100 a month—a price many more families and school districts can afford. Now that’s disruptive!

Although it is certainly not the flashiest technology out there, how it’s used and the business model in which it is planted is far more important in determining if it’s disruptive, and this meets the tests. That isn’t to say Rethink Autism is guaranteed of being successful. It is off to a good start, however.

Online learning conjures up lots of images in people’s minds. Some people imagine the vast possibilities for how it could develop as learning migrates to an online platform that allows for rich collaborations and private explorations both online and offline. Others think drill-and-kill software and imagine offerings that drive education to a narrow and sadly limited definition of learning.

As with most disruptive innovations, the first examples of online learning were primitive. They often represented a PowerPoint simply put on the Web. Students clicked through some material, maybe answered a few multiple-choice questions, and exchanged a few emails with a teacher perhaps.

But technology improves predictably. Online learning has been no exception.

It has improved in several ways. First, in the beginning online learning was primarily a form of distance learning. That is becoming less and less the case as online learning snaps into brick-and-mortar hybrid environments of various sorts in which, among other things, students can have access to in-person peer interactions and relationships with caring adults.

Second, the communication vehicles that connect humans in online learning environments are improving. Companies like Elluminate are making strides in enhancing the interactive experience of online learning all the time through improved and varied video, chat sessions, and so forth. As the hardware improves and 3D and other technology becomes more affordable, who knows how “real” a 2-way video conversation in the future could feel like.

Finally, the basic content and pure technology behind online learning are improving as well. Providers are moving beyond the basic PowerPoint, and we are in the beginning stages of players architecting systems that actually “learn” and improve real time based on the results of different students’ experiences. Companies like 360Ed in partnership with the Florida Virtual School have built full video game-based courses such as Conspiracy Code that are making the content far more engaging. Other players like Agilix, Knewton, and Renzulli Learning are working on making the content increasing adaptable for each individual student. And, as this fascinating article in Education Week discusses, researchers are making advances in creating “intelligent tutor” systems that pick up on student’s cues about their emotions and adapt accordingly.

What could online learning look like in 10 years time? Who knows, but the smart bet is a lot different and better from what it is today.

As people think about where to target potentially game-changing and disruptive innovations, as readers of this blog know there is a powerful case for starting the innovation at the margins where, for the would-be consumers of the offering, the alternative is nothing at all.

In the 18 months since the publication of Disrupting Class, we have learned much from traveling around and talking to the people actually out in the field doing the innovating. As a result, our knowledge of the areas of nonconsumption in the U.S. PreK-12 educational market has broadened considerably. Below is a list of these opportunities where there often is no “market” currently. Please feel free to chime in with others we have not noticed or give us your thoughts so that we can continue to learn together. The items on this list are by no means mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive.

Home-schoolers
Homebound students
AP and other advanced courses (25 percent of high schools don’t offer an advanced course)
Credit-recovery
Drop-outs/alternative schools
Small, rural, and urban schools are disproportionately affected by resource constraints and therefore have more areas of nonconsumption within them
Scheduling conflicts create areas of nonconsumption
Unit recovery
Disaster preparedness (for H1N1 and the like)
Tutoring
Professional development
Pre-K
After school
In the home
Incarcerated youth/juvenile detention centers/juvenile justice facilities
In-school suspension
School bus commute
Summer school
Teacher absenteeism

I spent last week in Japan as the guest of Sumitomo Corporation to learn about and research the potential for online learning to help the Japanese learn English. One night at dinner, one of my hosts, Chris Campbell, said: If you were to write a second edition of Disrupting Class, I would include a chapter about why video games are so motivating and what we can learn from them.

He continued: It’s useful to think about why video games are so motivating; in many cases it’s not obvious that they would be. Their topics are not always inherently interesting; they can be quite challenging to access. To bring the point home, think about it this way: what if video games were like schools?

I had never thought about it that way. I’m sure people have written about this, but it had not hit me so clearly. Despite reading Prensky and Gee and others about the potential for video games in learning, I had not seen it from the reverse perspective.

The answer is that if video games were like schools, they would be incredibly de-motivating for most no matter how interesting their topic. Just imagine. You have cleared a maze of enemies perhaps. Sorry, you can’t advance because it’s not the predetermined time when you are allowed to yet. Or sorry, you cannot level up or advance to another challenge until everyone in your randomly assigned cohort has done so as well. You say you’ve been through the challenge 5 times already and mastered it? That’s nice but sorry.

Or perhaps think about the reverse. You’re struggling with a certain challenge and have not yet mastered it, but some arbitrary time limit doesn’t just say time is up, you lose, try again. Instead it says: Time is up, on to the more advanced challenge. You need tools from the previous challenge to conquer the further problems? Sorry, that’s just too bad. We have to keep moving.

It’s not hard to extend the analogy further into team “project-like” settings and others. I’d love for people to do so here. But can you imagine the frustration? Or boredom? Or downright bewilderment? Could you blame someone for tuning out?

There is a compelling commentary in the September 23, 2009 Education Week titled “Failing to Learn from Failure.” Written by Craig D. Hochbein & Daniel L. Duke, the authors make the point that in education, unlike in many other fields, we don’t do rigorous post-mortems on failures.

As they write, “Instead, the fulcrum of many school reform policies and turnaround strategies has relied on leveraging the elusive notion of ‘better.’” This is in line with what I’ve seen—most strategies are incremental improvements to the existing system, or, as they write: “better recruiting, training, and pay of school personnel, better use of academic time, implementation of better curricula, access to better early-childhood education”, and on and on.

They write about how education research needs to be overhauled—and in many cases, the system really needs to open itself up to research period. In doing so, we must learn the real causal lessons of why things happen the way they do, not just things at the level of correlations, which has hurt education research for far too long as we wrote about in Chapter 7 of Disrupting Class.

The writers focus on addressing what are the early warning signs that a school is in decline. I would go a step further; are we asking the wrong question? Rather than ask why aren’t schools performing as they should, perhaps we should be asking why isn’t each student learning? If we changed the question, then what would we find?

Secondly, I’d also focus on another aspect here, which is that taking risks and learning from them is a valuable thing. It’s something we teach all the time, but we don’t necessarily do in education and instead try to stay with the “safe” thing, which hasn’t brought us great results either. Without taking risks in health care and many other fields, where would we be today?

The key is taking smart risks, by which I mean not betting the farm at first, but making small bets to test assumptions, learn rapidly, and then adjust our course. If we find success, then we can scale gradually. Doing so will also make a significant contribution to our body of understanding in education.

A new report by research firm Ambient Insight says that by 2014, 10.5 million PreK-12 students will attend classes online. As many will recall, in the book Disrupting Class, we predicted that by 2019 50 percent of all high school courses will be online—and by 2014 we had predicted 25 percent. Guess we’re not the only ones making a bold prediction here anymore.

According to THE Journal, Ambient Insight’s Chief Research Officer says that about 450,000 K-12 students attend virtual school full time and another 1.75 million take some of their classes online. If true, those numbers—particularly the first—represent higher estimates than I had been seeing.

You can download the executive summary of the report here; unfortunately the full report is out of my price range, although if people have read it, please comment here for our other readers.

One interesting thing that emerges from this is that this market is a reasonably robust private sector one at the moment. This is a bit of a rare phenomenon in K-12 education, but these signs of investment activity are positive ones. This suggests that the government’s role may be first and foremost one of providing the context for this to grow in an efficacious way, but also to be careful not to crowd out the private investment with its own competing investment dollars or to create too much process-focused regulation such that it stifles the potential innovation that comes from this. If we manage this correctly, we will hopefully see not just the boom of online learning, but also the boom of a student-centric system that provides every student—regardless of geography, income, or learning preferences—a rich set of choices.

Judging from the article, one thing I think the report may miss is that the growth of online learning is increasingly less of a distance phenomenon and more of a hybrid one. I want to be careful about concluding that, however, because I know our own book was misinterpreted by many in this regard.

In a Wall Street Journal article titled “Online High Schools Test Students’ Social Skills,” Paul Glader writes about the challenges online schools and students have with regards to the lack of in-person social interaction.

In our case study about the Alpine Online School, we chronicled how that school dealt with this by holding activities and creating opportunities for students to mingle with each other in person. Glader chronicles similar attempts as well as some online attempts to foster more social interaction such as having an online student government and model U.N. In many cases, however, these attempts have not worked, as students have clamored for more in-person contact.

We’ve addressed some of the broader related concerns around socialization in a blog before, but this element of not meeting the students’ own needs and motivations should be of concern, too, if we’re trying to build a student-centric system. As we think about how the online learning disruption improves year over year, its ability to better connect students to other students and teachers is likely one facet of this—whether this be through improved video chat functionality or discussion boards and the like or by adding a brick-and-mortar element to the online offering to form a hybrid-learning environment. For a variety of reasons I continue to believe the latter will be the form that serves most of the K-12 students in the future.

In essence, we “hire” education to do several jobs. One of these is learning, but there are other important jobs schooling does including a custodial/safety job as well as allowing children to socialize and have fun with friends. Migrating the learning job to an online platform but keeping children in a physical spot—creating a bricks-and-clicks environment in essence—should allow us to get the best of all worlds.

Areas of nonconsumption are often the most promising places to look for disruptive innovations. What’s hard about looking for these places is that, by their definition, there is no market and no data yet. As I’ve written before, nowhere is there more nonconsumption in education than in the developing world. As such, starting education innovations abroad where the alternative is literally nothing at all represents promising ground—and a place to look to for innovations.

I’m sure many people out there have way more expertise than do I on this topic, but a few things have caught my eye in recent days.

First, an eCampus News article discusses Yale Law School’s Information Society Project’s teaming up with University of the People, which is pioneering a tuition-free online university, to study “how online higher education is perceived worldwide and document what it takes for Internet-based institutions to achieve accreditation.”

Given the potential of innovations like University of the People to make an impact for those who do not have access to or cannot afford higher education in the developing world, the findings could be very interesting. Equally interesting might be how do innovations like this get around the regulations until the regulations ultimately cave to them and the new reality.

Second, there is a start-up learning organization in Mexico that reportedly is booming. Called the Learning and Innovation Network, it runs hybrid centers with computers and in-person facilitators to offer learning for users in the community in a variety of topics at affordable prices. The first centers opened in May, and they already have around 30,000 people from all age groups using them. The leadership team expects to reach 80,000 people by the end of year one with only 500 computers in 10 centers. Apparently there is a high demand for English courses; LIN bought Rosetta Stone licenses to incorporate into its model as a result, which has been well received thus far.

I would bet that many of the models that target these huge pockets of nonconsumption ultimately will be the most successful in figuring out the next generation of learning models. I’d love to have a discussion here with others about what else is out there to inform us all.

There has been some buzz in the media (here and here for example) about a new school that opened this year in New York City called the Quest to Learn (Q2L) school—the curriculum of which is based entirely on learning through (mostly video) games.

The idea that students could learn through playing video games is not new. As we’ve written in Disrupting Class and on this blog, many have written and researched about this—from Marc Prensky to James Paul Gee most notably. As we’ve discussed, Florida Virtual School pioneered a revolutionary fully online video-game based American History course, Conspiracy Code, earlier this year, under the idea that it should be working to make the work itself in education more engaging.

The research behind Q2L is in fact inspired in part by Gee’s research, according to the Economist. And the school itself appears to be the brainchild of Katie Salen, a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

What is new about the school—which started with 12-year-olds this year and will keep the students until they are 18—is two-fold. First, the whole curriculum is based on games. Second, the curriculum is dramatically different from that of the traditional one with the familiar English, Social Studies, Math, and so on. According to the Economist: “Quest to Learn’s school day will, rather, be divided into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of ‘domains’. Such domains include Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social studies), The Way Things Work (maths and science) and Sports for the Mind (game design and digital literacy). Each domain concludes with a two-week examination called a ‘Boss Level’—a common phrase in video-game parlance.” Because the school is public, its students will still have to take the normal subject-matter tests.

Now it’s true that we wouldn’t call Q2L a disruptive innovation (although perhaps some of its components may prove to be just that). It is also true that this dramatic re-envisioning of the fundamental architecture of a school reveals the power of utilizing heavyweight teams (which we wrote about in Chapter 9 of Disrupting Class) when rethinking the architecture—what components are needed, how they fit together—of a product or service is the goal. This use of games—that fundamentally rethinks schooling—could likely only come about in a new school like Q2L. As the Economist concludes,  “In education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.”