Clayton Christensen |

Educational computer games—video games for learning (a.k.a. serious games or edutainment)—have gained increasing attention over the last several years in academic, education, and gaming circles. In Disrupting Class we referenced a few of the top thinkers on the role games and simulations can play in education—people like Marc Prensky, James Paul Gee, and Chris Dede.

One reason people are so excited about educational games is because of how engaging and motivating games are naturally. Emerging research shows that many students are much more engaged when learning through a game than in more typical learning environments—and high engagement results in higher achievement. It also doesn’t take a whiz to see that many children already spend a ton of time with video games; moving learning to where the students are holds potential.

Yet despite their promise, serious games haven’t had a tremendous impact in formal learning environments to date. There are some limited successes—like Tabula Digita’s math games, for example (this article gives a solid overview)—but for the most part selling to and competing for time within traditional schools and classrooms remain difficult given many of the barriers we articulate in the book among others.

I’ve been left to wonder what would happen if educational gaming companies instead took a disruptive path and targeted nonconsumption rather than trying to penetrate the system by going in head first. “After school” has been one promising place of nonconsumption that has received some attention, but for a variety of reasons, adoption is still spotty although there are some successes.

To me, one natural fit has seemed to be introducing edutainment through the online learning channel. Because of the shift in platform and educational model, online learning is naturally well suited to educational gaming and other virtual simulations. I’ve always figured that offering educational games as a part of or an option in a course for those who would learn best through this path makes eminent sense.

Florida Virtual School is showing that that instinct could be right—and that I may also have underestimated the potential synergies—as FLVS is launching the first complete online game-based course for high school students in the form of a full American history course based on an online game scenario.

It’s called Conspiracy Code and FLVS designed it in partnership with 360Ed Inc., an educational game development company whose CEO, Ben Noel, is a former Electronic Arts employee.

The game has the potential to scale, according to Noel in the eSchool News article, and it is in beta testing right now with 65 students to understand how effective it is and do further research to improve it. Ultimately the University of Central Florida is planning a study on this using fMRI scans and so forth to understand the learning it produces in students.

It’s going to be fun to watch as the experiment evolves—both from a research perspective and from the perspective of where it goes next as FLVS plans future courses with 360Ed.

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Also, keep an eye on OnLive as a disruptive service for bringing affordable and easily accessible gaming to the masses. Could it suggest a path forward for education gaming, too?

CNN.com published a piece by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn today, June 2, 2009, on the recent federal stimulus funds for education–and on what the proper role of the federal government should be in in transforming our schools. You can read the commentary, “Don’t prop up failing schools,” here. Let us know what you think by commenting on the article, and we can also continue the conversation on this blog as well.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that roughly $5 billion of the $19.5 billion in E-Rate funds committed to schools and libraries from 1998 to 2006 were never spent. This article from eSchool News does a good job of summarizing.

For those who don’t know, the E-Rate program helps schools and libraries pay for Internet connectivity. If roughly 25 percent of funds over that period were not used, does that indicate that schools don’t need the funds?

Far from it. Many schools lag in their Internet connectivity, and of those that are hooked up to high-speed connections, many don’t have enough capacity to handle large groups of people online at the same time. This of course limits the ability of online learning to transform education into a student-centric system as we write about since it limits how robust and dynamic an online learning experience can be.

So why would these funds not be claimed then? There are a few reasons, which range from the fact that the applicant’s needs changed or they needed fewer dollars than they applied for to the fact that the sheer complexity and bureaucratic red-tape in the program often caused people to leave money on the table—or, speaking from what I’ve heard on the road—not apply.

This suggests a few things. First, as we think about sending more funding down for broadband, we ought to figure out ways to first use funds already allocated for the cause.

Second, we can learn some valuable lessons from North Carolina’s work with E-Rate. The state of North Carolina saw that many smaller districts would not apply for the E-Rate funds because of the bureaucratic red tape and they just didn’t have the time or manpower to devote to it. As a result, the state stepped in and helped the districts apply for the funds, which has helped North Carolina extend broadband across the state to get every school online.

This effort of course also suggests that the process for applying for funds for broadband needs to be simplified.

And lastly, the federal government should push districts to install the bandwidth necessary not just for today’s needs, but also in anticipation of tomorrow’s. This might include installing wireless and extending that access to the broader communities, not just the school buildings, for example. When we invest in infrastructures of change today, we should do so with an eye toward the future, not just the present.

Is owning content the future in education, or will it be more important to help people navigate through it and filter it to find useful learning that pertains to their needs and desires?

With the free resources increasingly on the Web—two of which we wrote about a few blog posts ago here—one can make the argument that content is becoming more of a commodity. Certainly there are many avenues to find free stuff to help you learn something, and Lifehacker has a post up that highlights several of these.

From resources to help you teach yourself a music instrument or to program code to helping you get a “Personal MBA” or similar formal learning objects that a liberal arts major would work with in getting a degree, there are tons of sites that Lifehacker gives some tips for finding—and then navigating.

There are some neat business models out there as well, such as TeachMate, which allows people to trade skills—the example Lifehacker gives is you can teach someone English and in exchange they teach you to cook.

What other free resources are out there on the Web that you are seeing and using to advance learning?

Days ago YouTube launched a new “channel” or sub-site—YouTube EDU. The site gathers thousands of free lectures from over a hundred universities across the country and offers them online for free. The site doesn’t just have scattered videos—it has hundreds of full courses, too.

As some have been quick to point out, this isn’t “as good” as actually paying thousands of dollars a year to go the universities so you can get interaction with the professors, have a human touch, ask questions and so forth. You also can’t get a certified degree through YouTube EDU.

But as many others have pointed out, you often cannot get that personal touch in many large lecture classes anyway, and what’s more, many people can’t pay the high tuition rates at these universities or gain admission to them. YouTube offers it all online for free—thereby bringing the opportunity to learn from the leading academics to anyone at any time nearly anywhere. It looks like disruption at its finest—and if someone like the University of the People, which is opening in just days, wraps this in a new business model and offers certification and a degree or perhaps a service like StraighterLine offers access to human beings to answer questions, who knows where this all could go and how it might improve over time to meet these initial shortcomings.

There are other players out here playing in this game as well, such as Academic Earth, which offers better navigation features to find the lecture in which you’re interested and so forth, but reportedly has fewer videos up at the moment.

Who knows how it will evolve, but here’s a guess that the disruption will improve in a myriad of unforeseen ways and will come to benefit the lives of many more people who couldn’t access the original expensive and inconvenient offering.

In the Winter 2009 issue of Education Next, John E. Chubb and Terry Moe debate Larry Cuban in a forum over whether educational technology will change the role of the teacher and the nature of learning.

It will perhaps come as no surprise to readers of Disrupting Class that Cuban is skeptical that it will. As Cuban has written in the past, technologies have repeatedly promised much but delivered little besides the hype. We cite his work extensively in our book and agree with his analysis of why this has been the case.

But as readers also know, we see a new opportunity for an educational technology like online learning to now make a transformational impact—provided people take a disruptive approach. Although certainly some concerted efforts can—and have—changed the fundamental classroom, we think that most of the change from technology won’t come in our traditional classroom at all (so there’s no real disagreement here with Cuban in many ways), but instead will come by being wrapped in a new organizational model and targeting non-consumption.

Chubb and Moe share our view about the potential for change, and in their upcoming book, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, lay out their case for why and how this will happen. They approach the question from a different angle, and as it appears from the article, have some interesting insights. Can’t wait to read the book!

Also, take a look at the graphs of online learning growth in the article—particularly Florida Virtual School’s growth. Quite stunning. I think it shows the power of removing many of the barriers to this disruptive innovation and letting it grow at its natural pace.

Paul Tough of the New York Times chronicled a fascinating innovation—the One-Room School Bus—in the 8th Annual Year in Ideas.

Professor Billy Hudson of Vanderbilt University started up the project, the Aspirnaut Initiative, to turn the school bus into a mobile classroom. Buses are wired for connectivity, and students receive laptops or netbooks and are enrolled in online math and science courses. On the way to and from school, children take the courses, complete assignments, do research, and communicate with instructors online. In the pilot project, other students use video iPods to watch science and math content.

What is equally fascinating is where Hudson started the project. In rural Grapevine, Ark., children spend up to three hours a day on the school bus—wasted idle hours at the moment, but also a perfect example of nonconsumption and a golden opportunity. By next fall, Hudson and his wife hope to have enrolled 2,000 students in rural communities across Arkansas.

For districts and states seeking to foster some disruptive innovations, thinking in ways similar to this is a good start. Any other similar stories out there?

There was a series of articles recently in the New York Times about video games and computers in education. One about using video games to hook children into reading, “Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers,” created a stir.

It even prompted an email from one of the readers of our blog. She asked us to write a letter to the New York Times immediately—which, sadly, I didn’t do. But I thought I would post some of what she wrote and let it speak for itself.

She said: “Encourage the adoption of this technology. It may still have room to improve but for those kids who learn well through the stimulation of video games, it’s a more effective way of getting them to read than a teacher standing in front of the classroom.  The goal is not to find one way of teaching kids everything… This is one part of a multi-part solution. … Let the kids decide if it works for them. … It won’t be effective for all kids, but that’s not how its success should be measured. …

That line about Dostoyevsky vs. a video game ‘meaning something’ stuck with me. To bookworm kids, reading Dostoyevsky is more impactful, more dramatic, more ‘sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat’ worthy than the World of Warcraft equivalent. To other people, Warcraft is much more stimulating. Allow for both!”

What is she talking about when she starts talking about Dostoyevsky? Read the article and find out. And then let us know what you think.

Another article worth reading on the same theme in the New York Times was “Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend: Algebra.” It is about a video game, Dimension M, made by Tabula Digita, that quizzes students on math—from algebra to fractions. It seems to be a big extrinsic motivator for students to tackle math and costs only $10 to $20 per student. A large handful of middle schools are trying it out, and the Games for Learning Institute, a $3 million research effort at New York University, will be studying it further.

It’s been an exciting week in the U.S. An historic presidential election concluded with a landmark result of which all of us can proud regardless of our political views. We look forward to seeing what an Obama presidency will mean for the future of education. In the President-elect’s past remarks, he has spoken eloquently about the potential for technology to play a game-changing role in education. We hope he continues to embrace this potential and helps open disruptive paths for such innovations as online learning that hold the potential for game-changing transformations.

An upcoming book helps show why this is important. Titled The Development of Giftedness and Talent Across the Life Span, it has some interesting insights on the nature of giftedness—namely how academic talent can wax and wane over time and how it can be nurtured and taught, according to an Education Week article previewing the book.

One implication of this work is that the structure of schools doesn’t always support this fluidity. “Children might move in and out of ‘gifted’ programs more frequently, based on their individual needs,” says the article in paraphrasing the book’s co-editor, Frances Degen Horowitz.

There are obviously many problems in doing this in current schools. For example, I imagine moving children in and out of gifted classes might crush their confidence and hurt their feeling of self-efficacy. It goes to the problem of how social promotion and holding a child back both have inherent problems associated with them.

Online or computer-based learning introduced disruptively can help solve this tradeoff. By being individually paced but not taking a child out of his or her social environment in essence, it allows for children to take what is most relevant for their individual needs at any given time. In theory it can also allow children to match with others from around the world that are in similar places, but not create static environments that could have negative effects on development. And for those children who remain “advanced” compared to their social peers, it can allow them to continue to work through challenging material to grow and expand their horizons without becoming bored—an exciting proposition to allow all children to realize their fullest potential and promise.

*Note: I will be out of the country and on vacation starting tomorrow for the next two weeks. I will not be posting to the blog during this time. I will resume my regular weekly posts upon my return.

I had planned originally to blog again about higher education, but this has been a busy few days of activity around the book and its themes so I thought it would be worthwhile posting some links to the various events and presentations and offering a few brief reflections.

Clay and I gave a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute along with Jason Hwang on the 27th titled “Disruptive Innovation in Education and Health Care” (video and audio are online here). Checker Finn was on the education panel with us as well which made for a lively discussion.  Education Week’s Andrew Trotter wrote an article about the event as well.

The next day I was in Arizona where I had the opportunity to keynote NACOL’s Virtual School Symposium. This was an exciting and informative event with somewhere around 1,100 people in attendance. It’s a conference that, just like online learning, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years.

I’ve said this before, but NACOL, the International Association for K12 Online Learning, is doing some great work in this space. The organization is a great source of information and is helping sponsor useful research to further the field.

Among the worthwhile reports that I recommend highly and that you can find from NACOL’s site are the latest issue of Threshold magazine and the latest Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report (just came out on October 23rd). These reports help show that online learning really is booming and will help any reader understand what it really is.

There has been lots of activity on the Web about these events—many praising and others with insightful criticisms. One of the most interesting things, however, that I observe is the difference in conversations taking place. When you are in the Beltway or talking with people who have been in the thick of education for years, although many do see the promise online learning holds, many also don’t believe it’s happening and growing in disruptive fashion. If you are in the actual space and seeing the number of entrepreneurs and districts diving in and having successes, however, you see a very different picture. This is not necessarily surprising given how disruptive innovation works, but it is interesting.

Lastly, Scott McLeod, an associate professor and coordinator of the Educational Administration Program at Iowa State University and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), delivered a great presentation on the Web at the K12 Online Conference. His thesis in essence is that the coming disruptive changes necessitate new leadership models for schools. It’s a 20-minute presentation that summarizes some core concepts from our work and is well worth watching.