Clayton Christensen |

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.

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

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.

Last week Innosight Institute published its second case study. This one profiled the rise of Florida Virtual School (FLVS), an online public school in Florida that, in the previous school year, served over 70,000 students up from a mere 77 in the first year of its operations just over a decade ago.

This stunning rise shows that being an education reform (or transformation) and having scale are not mutually exclusive—contrary to the opinion of many. There are many interesting aspects of the case to dissect. This week and next I’ll chronicle a few of the thoughts that I had when reading it.

What’s notable for starters is how FLVS got its start—from a small $200,000 grant. There was no multi-million dollar investment here until FLVS proved that it had developed a viable model that was successfully educating children who the existing system was not reaching.

FLVS’s leadership team also had a blank slate with which to rethink what education should look like. The team was not bound by tradition. FLVS put the student in the center and wondered how to best serve her. The outcome? Among other things a solution that does not follow the old agrarian calendar and is not tied to seat time.

The school was also free to experiment. As it used a totally new medium for delivering education, no one knew what FLVS should look like. It tried all sorts of things. And it made lots of mistakes—including the 2-year chemistry course we write about in the case. But what was important was that FLVS tested things out, received rapid results—and then changed course accordingly and promptly. This is a necessary component of any start up—and not something we allow that often in education. Indeed, from The Innovator’s Solution, “research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success. Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known.” Ultimately, from FLVS’s rapid experimentation, a viable solution and strategy emerged.

In keeping with the above, FLVS also confronted an initial puzzle—who would use this? The answer? Nonconsumers. Why? Because the solution for them was better than their alternative, which was nothing at all. And it didn’t invite push back from the existing districts and interests. In fact, it helped the existing schools better serve their students, which was a new value proposition. Classic disruption.

According to an article in eSchool News, online programs are seeing a dramatic spike in teaching applications.

Specifically, K12, Inc. and Connections Academy are reporting massive spikes in applications, and the article theorizes that it’s because of the layoffs in the traditional brick-and-mortar schools. There are some other contributors as well—such as specialists like mathematicians wanting to share their knowledge and teachers who are seeking a change.

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. As online learning continues to grow rapidly even as there is contraction in the traditional system, there will be more jobs available in online, and for certain people—although certainly not all—online teaching presents a more attractive career path for a variety of reasons (the ones cited above, flexibility, etc.).

Additionally, there is an interesting piece in Education Week that is an interview with Chris Dede, a professor of learning technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When Professor Dede speaks, I make it a matter of habit to try and listen (or read in this case!), and this interview doesn’t disappoint as he talks about both the current state of and the future of online professional development in a short piece.

As I’ve noted before, professional development is in fact a big area of nonconsumption in many districts and presents an exciting place to provide potentially much more useful, just-in-time training to teachers that matches with the need they have in a format that will be most effective for them.

Professor Dede paints a richer, more nuanced picture—from the current challenges facing online professional development and why simply converting face-to-face professional development to an online format doesn’t make sense to the types of customization, interaction, and reflection that are possible in this world. In addition, he sees that, in this case, the market seems to be working and pushing online professional development to improve. He also believes that two factors—the need for scale in professional development and the need for fundamentally more affordable models—as a big drive for why online professional development will evolve and grow rapidly in the years ahead.

Also, one note — watch the video of Professor Dede where he talks about our book. I actually don’t see this as a disagreement at all, as readers of this blog will know. We don’t say in the book that schools will go out of business in the book as Professor Dede asserts. That’s why it’s called Disrupting Class–not Disrupting Schools.

I am excited to write today about Innosight Institute’s first published case study. You can read the executive summary here and download the full version here.

Leland Anderson, a visiting research fellow at Innosight Institute, is the primary author of the case, which revolves around Utah’s Alpine School District’s launching of an online school with K12, Inc., to reach nonconsumers in its district—namely home-schooled students. Alpine is one of the 100 largest school districts in the United States.

The case on this school, Alpine Online, sheds light on a number of interesting things around the disruptive phenomenon of online learning and how it works. Some tidbits:

- From the economic perspective, Alpine was able to pick and choose among offerings from K12, Inc. and assemble other district resources in an affordable way so that it could fund the full school with just the allotted per-pupil funds from the state itself (roughly $2,500 per pupil per year!).

- Students only move on to the next objective once they have mastered at least 80 percent of the material in front of them—which means the learning opportunities are more tailored to their individual pace and needs. Interestingly, there is a minimum time requirement—students are still required to spend 990 hours engaged in learning activities per year—although since this is not restricted by course, there is flexibility in a student’s learning activities. Some students take multiple math courses in a given year, for example, if they are able to accelerate. Others can devote more time to just one math course; if the social studies curriculum is easier for them, they could spend less time there, for example.

- Many of the learning activities still occur offline with physical objects and books and so forth—not on the computer. The computer is merely the platform.

- Alpine Online also contracted with the disruptive innovator Rosetta Stone to provide 14 foreign language offerings at a “whopping” $13 per license!

Read the case and let us know what you think. What have they done that makes sense to you? What doesn’t make sense? What have they done that is circumstance-specific and would not apply to your situation? Are there other elements that are more universal?

One of the chief purposes of these case studies is description to gain a clear understanding of the phenomenon. This is a core piece to any body of rigorous research. These case studies will allow us to better understand education disruptions—from their promise to their current shortfalls to how they work in the trenches. We hope that this will give policymakers and other stakeholders a clearer understanding of how these disruptions work and what they actually are.

Stay tuned for our next case study as well about the origins, the policies, and the workings of a state-launched disruption—the Florida Virtual School—which we will publish in early October.

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?

Clayton Christensen and I have a piece up on the Harvard Business Review blog titled A Solution to School District Budget Cuts. It is about the cuts that the LA Unified School District and others are making to summer school and the like–and how they ought to view budget shortages not as threats but as opportunities to transform the system. In this case, rather than simply cut summer school almost entirely–which might save money in the short run but will in fact create much bigger costs overall–why not offer many of these courses still but online? More detail is in the piece.

Simple and mindless cuts don’t make much sense, and we need people to think more strategically. Creative, disruptive solutions to transform old systems are vital. Business as usual isn’t going to return anytime soon.

New school models are appearing that attempt to personalize learning and push education in a more student-centric direction. Some target drop-out students—a classic group of non-consumers—and therefore appear to have some disruptive elements potentially, whereas others are more conventional, but either way, all are something to pay attention to as we rethink what “schooling” should actually look like.

As Clayton Christensen and Jason Hwang write in The Innovator’s Prescription, when there is no non-consumption in a field, the only way for disruption to occur is for something to come in that is both significantly less expensive and better so that the decision to switch over makes consummate sense. Most chartered schools to this point haven’t hit on one or both of these, which has stymied their ability to scale and have broader impact. The below models may give us some clues as to how that could change.

One model is a new chartered school called the Redmond Proficiency Academy. Operated by Personalized Learning, Inc., the school plans to combine the best from “college-, online- and project-based class learning” to formulate a personalized learning experience for students. The school is also moving away from seat-time metrics and time spent in the conventional classroom and instead focuses on demonstration of “proficiency” or mastery inside and outside the classroom to satisfy state and federal requirements.

Westwood’s Cyber High School is another model to follow. It has two models that it lets students choose between. One is “My School,” which has a virtual and a physical component to it where students come into a school lab a couple times a week. The second is called “Not School” where the experience is entirely online. The concept comes from the “Not School” Program in the United Kingdom, and Westwood’s founders have studied the model to learn from its mistakes and successes. The schools target disaffected or drop-out students by allowing them to work in a proficiency-based model of online project-based learning. And it seems to have hit a niche, as many students are gobbling up the offering from all over Michigan.

One other school model that has some exciting potential is Mavericks in Education. It, too, targets drop-out students, with a model that turns the traditional school day on its head as it offers online learning with on-site mentors in its physical buildings during different times of the day for fewer hours to match each student’s unique circumstances—and all students have 24/7 access to learning from anywhere as well. It also has some neat perks that it has built in to motivate students to learn and accelerate their progress.

Learning from these models could go a long way in helping us transform education into a student-centric experience.

Note: The original post contained an error as it referred to the Redmond Proficiency Academy as the Richmond Proficiency Academy. I have corrected it above and regret the error.

For those who follow our blog and are interested in online learning, a must read is the latest report by Anthony G. Picciano and Jeff Seaman, entitled “K-12 Online Learning: A 2008 Follow-up of the Survey of U.S. School District Administrators.” You can find the report here.

Published by The Sloan Consortium in January 2009, the report builds off an earlier one from two years before that the authors did in which they chronicled the emerging landscape of online learning in K-12 education through a survey that reached district administrators in a range of representative districts—rural, town, suburban, and urban. We used that report to inform our work in writing Disrupting Class extensively, as we found it to be among the best sources of information out there.

This report does not disappoint either. The highlights are good, but the fuller report is also rich—as is the fair discussion of our book toward the end of the report.

A few things worth noting from the report’s highlights (along with some brief personal commentary), and then I encourage everyone to read the report:

-    A whopping 75 percent of public school districts offer online or blended courses
-    Most of these districts anticipate their online offerings will grow, and the biggest growth appears to be in blended learning—something that makes sense to us for a variety of reasons.
-    According to Picciano and Seaman’s numbers, enrollments in online courses grew 47 percent from 2005-06 to 2007-08.
-    Online courses are meeting the needs of a range of students—from those who need credit recovery to those desiring advanced courses. This dovetails with our observations.
-    An encouraging sign in my view is that they report that school districts are relying on multiple online learning providers. I hope that this will give students different choices to find the best courses for their learning needs and styles.
-    Online courses represent an absolute lifeline for small rural school districts. Not only do they help them offer nice-to-have courses, they also help them offer basic, core courses, too, that they would otherwise not be able to offer. Again, this matches with what I see. For example, the Department of Education reports that 25 percent of schools don’t offer any advanced courses, as defined as anything above Algebra 2, Biology (so no Chemistry and Physics), and any honors English. I guarantee there are plenty of students in those schools who would like or need the opportunity to take those courses, however, so online courses are filling a core need.