Clayton Christensen |

Staying with the non-consumption theme from last week, let’s think about the biggest area of non-consumption in education that just cries for disruptive education models to come in and make an impact: poor children in the developing world.

According to a September 29, 2008 Newsweek article titled “Education: It’s Not Just About the Boys. Get Girls Into School,” “73 million children worldwide don’t go to primary school. Three times as many never go to secondary school.”

This is an area ripe for innovation.

In Gene Sperling’s book What Works in Girls’ Education, he writes about how focusing solutions around educating girls in essence gets the most bang for the buck in improving society. A barrier is that families are often uncomfortable when their daughters have to travel long distances to schools that don’t even have separate latrines for the boys and girls, for example. Another barrier in developing countries is even when they make education free, which benefits the poor immensely, they can’t afford or find the teachers they need to account for the spike in students.

It’s not hard to see how e-learning could help. The trick will be in devising models to get effective solutions in the hands of the would-be students. Many have already identified mobile solutions as the way to go, and I expect that learning on mobile devices will have a much greater impact abroad than in the United States for some time—for the same reasons cell phone usage in Africa has leap-frogged that of the United States.

Indeed, companies like Qooco in China have already made an impact in this arena. Unless the United States is on the ball, it’s entirely possible that truly student-centric solutions will emerge in the developing world well before they do in the United States as well. What other groups are making an impact like Qooco? How are they doing it? For those who spend time studying this world, what trends do you see?

There’s a fascinating article in the August 17, 2008 New York Times Magazine by Paul Tough. It’s titled “A Teachable Moment” and is well worth the read.

There are many strands in here worth unpacking, including the ongoing debate about can good schools be enough to turn around children or do you need all parts of society coming together if you are to have any hope. Our book discusses this in part, and Innosight Institute will address this question with a more comprehensive paper in the coming months.

For now, I want to focus on this line: “The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the [Katrina] flood –- many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired.”

The total lack of options resulting in New Orleans from this tragedy created vast nonconsumption of schooling, as described in the article. Nonconsumption, as we stress, allows for disruptive models to emerge to address jobs needing to be done. This is a unique opportunity in the U.S., and indeed, there is a lot of innovation happening in New Orleans schools –- just as we would predict. It’s a fascinating laboratory, and one in which even more innovative ideas could be tried to really make an impact and improve children’s lives. We hope others, like this blogger, see that opportunity, too.

Previously on this blog I’ve written about how adult distance learning is proving itself as a fast-growing disruptive innovation. As many have pointed out to me, there are many other disruptive innovations in higher education that are fulfilling critical needs in our society, including community colleges.

It’s a disruption Clay Christensen has written about before (see “Disruptive Innovation for Social Change” in the December 2006 Harvard Business Review). The Christian Science Monitor is the latest to pick up on this growing disruption. In the August 4, 2008 article “Community Colleges: A Great Return on Investment,” Haas Graduate Business School professor Kathleen Connell chronicles the phenomenon of more and more students choosing to attend affordable community colleges instead of the traditional 4-year schools that are far more expensive.

Nearly half, or 6.5 million, of all undergraduate students now attend the roughly 1,200 community colleges out there, according to the article. And they bear the classic hallmarks of a disruptive innovation.

They are far more affordable, convenient, and accessible. $2,361 for tuition compared to $6,185 at public four-year institutions and $16,640 for out-of-state students. Students can live at home and attend. And they don’t have the conventional admission standards.

They also fill different purposes and can be judged on different metrics from traditional four-year schools as they target nonconsumers. They are far more market-driven, as the article makes clear; they educate 60 percent of new nurses and credential 80 percent of firefighters, law enforcement officers, and EMTs. Forty-one percent also offer online degrees, which often serves mid-career professionals – business leaders love them for retraining workforces, Dr. George R. Boggs, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) said. They also offer much smaller classes.

Of course, like any disruptive innovation, they don’t offer the same performance as the traditional offering right now, but continue to improve in other areas. Here, as the article points out, you lose out on the vast array of student activities and sports and lack a student community.

I’ll continue to write about disruptions in higher education, as the freer market leads to many more in this space, but we’d love to hear from others about what disruptions they are seeing in this space and how they might play out.

In a telling sign of the growth of and the potential for online learning, for-profit Edison Schools Inc. has jumped on the bandwagon with the acquisition of Provost Systems Inc., a company that offers online courses and online learning management tools for schools, according to a July 1, 2008 article in Education Week.

Edison will also change its name to EdisonLearning to reflect its expansion beyond its controversial management of public schools. It will be able to offer online courses to students directly, as well as through existing schools and districts. According to the article and Edison’s CEO, Terry Stecz, Edison wants to become “the preferred partner for large urban systems, states, or cities.”

The article quotes Trace A. Urdan, the managing director of Baltimore-based investment bank Signal Hill Capital Group LLC, and a longtime analyst of the for-profit education industry, as saying that although “Edison’s new direction might not be motivated by a desire to minimize controversy, it could very well have that effect.”

“They started at the much more difficult end of the spectrum, and now they’re moving into the less controversial, arguably easier end,” Urdan said in the article. “It’s getting away from the idea of, ‘We’re here to do what you do better than you do’ and into, ‘We’re selling you something you need and don’t have.’”

This insight is a classic hallmark of disruption—and stands in sharp contrast to Edison’s initial approach, which was not disruptive. As Disrupting Class chronicles, disruption takes a simple product that is “good enough” and offers it in a place where the incumbent in a market place, in this case public school districts, are relieved that they don’t have to offer the product or service themselves.

Generally this happens as entrants target “non-consumption,” places where consumers have literally no other option, so the incumbents weren’t planning on offering them something anyway. As we argue in this book, this is precisely how and where online learning has gotten its start.

And there’s evidence that school districts are thrilled to be offering the options and moving more courses online. Just look at my previous post that quotes representatives from the LA and Chicago school districts if you want evidence. These are among the biggest and most troubled school districts in the country, and clearly they enjoy the disruptive approach of online learning.

Are people seeing other organizations make a similar pivot in the learning space?

One of the biggest questions I am often asked is, “Can online learning benefit minority students or those who struggle most to learn in school?”

It’s asked because one of the easy examples of non-consumption where online learning has taken root is for Advanced Placement (AP) and other advanced courses. The assumption that drives the question is that where we need to improve outcomes isn’t for those at the top; it’s for those who are dropping out, not learning how to read, and so on.

An article in eSchool News titled “Panelists: Online learning can help minority students” begins to answer the question quite well.

Sharnell Jackson, the chief eLearning officer for the Chicago Public Schools, and Themy Sparangis, the chief technology officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, along with Ray Rose, director of programs at MentorNet, were the panelists in a Webinar that the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) hosted on the topic. Their conclusion? Online learning can be a big benefit to underrepresented student populations.

And it’s a benefit in precisely the places we’d predict: areas of non-consumption, including for dropout recovery, for kids in juvenile detention centers, where school courses don’t have enough enrollment, and for schools that don’t have enough educators to teach a specific subject. Online courses help in the latter two cases to ensure equitable access for all students, Sparangis said.

As Jackson said, “Online can be an alternative to school if either you physically cannot attend school or if a traditional classroom setting does not fit your specific needs. With online learning, a student can finish their high school degree, make up credits, and enrich traditional curriculum.”

Interestingly enough, out of all the high schools in Illinois that use online learning, a predominantly Hispanic high school has the highest online learning pass rate.

The panelists went on to explain how online learning is often more rigorous than regular classroom learning and, in their experience, how students often have the same if not better learning outcomes, as measured by state tests. Classes can be more individualized, have increased assessment and monitoring, have interactive options, and provide a host of online resources for students.

In our view, this is just the beginning of a truly student-centric learning experience for our children. The disruptive innovation of online learning is planting itself in these footholds for students who otherwise would have no other course option and are not well served, and as it increasingly does so, it will also gradually improve. As it does so, it will benefit students who have struggled traditionally in schools far more than anyone else.

An April article in eSchool News titled “Schools mull needs of adult distance learners” discusses the growing demand from adults to take online courses.

This is a classic area of non-consumption. Many adults would like to have some form of ongoing education for any number of reasons –- to gain new skills for a future job, for general enrichment and curiosity, and so on — but often there have not been good options to fulfill these jobs. Most colleges have historically been tailored for the 18- to 22-year-old demographic, for example, and it’s hard to attend a school full time if you need to work or have a family. Night school often is not a satisfactory option.

With its convenience of allowing a student to take it any time, any place, and at any pace, online education is stepping in to fill the need. According to Capella University Vice Chairman Michael Offerman, the average student at Capella is 40 years old –- which shows there is a big untapped market here. As further proof of its power, Bill Gates recently told NBC’s Tom Brokaw in a June interview that he takes online education courses –- and finds them very useful.

As Offerman writes in his blog, “Despite clear changes in the demographics of American higher education, public discussion and public policy consideration are still based on the tradition of the 18-year-old going directly from high school to full-time, on-campus study.”

We’re just at the beginning of seeing how the Internet can revolutionize learning. Disruptive approaches to learning such as targeting adults will help improve the medium and push the conversation forward.

In classic disruptive fashion, according to the article, at the moment adult online education works best for the more motivated students, just as K-12 online education does. But over time, we can imagine it improving. Providers are fashioning it to be student centric. If the technology is honed in this foothold market in this fashion, this could have a big payoff for K-12 education down the line if providers transfer the relevant portions of what they learn from serving adults.