Clayton Christensen |

As readers of this blog will know, we are fans of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) as it represents one of the more noteworthy policy innovations by a state legislature across several dimensions. There are some foolhardy and misguided attempts currently floating around the Florida legislature, however, that threaten to unravel much of the FLVS innovation.

We wrote about one part of this misadventure in an April 15th op-ed on the Huffington Post and recommend it to our readers.

Suffice to say we hope that Florida does not reverse 13 years of innovative policymaking over the next few weeks by striking at the very areas that made FLVS a welcome disruption—and a potentially transformative force to move public education one step closer toward a student-centric learning system.

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?

Even as concerns mount that too many of our nation’s children are unprepared for and not attending college, thousands of students in California are clamoring each year for such a college experience in the state’s university system.

Unfortunately for them, the California State University system announced it will cut back its total enrollment by about 10,000 students next fall. That is 10,000 students to whom California is now saying in essence, “Maybe college isn’t that important for you after all.” Talk about a mixed message.

Increasingly, policymakers, foundations, academics, and educators are lining up behind the goal of students not just graduating from high school, but also graduating ready for a postsecondary education. The Gates Foundation places its muscle squarely behind this goal. Academics point out that now, more than ever before, a postsecondary education is necessary to command a reasonable wage in the workforce. And educators like Larry Rosenstock, CEO of High Tech High in San Diego, speak persuasively about the need for students to graduate well prepared for college.

Judging from attendance in the full-time and part-time programs at California State University campuses, many students are getting the message. Roughly 460,000 students are enrolled this year.  But if this number is capped at 450,000 for next year, realization of the college-ready goal will be an empty pledge.

Chancellor Charles Reed said the need to scale back enrollment was caused because of a strain on the university’s physical plant. Thanks to overcrowding and under-funding, he said, there are simply not enough classrooms and other resources available to provide students with a quality education that can promise them an on-time graduation (“CSU to turn away 10,000 students,” San Francisco Chronicle, 11/18/2008).

Although the State University’s predicament and actions are perhaps understandable given the economy and falling endowment, there is a better solution for California’s children: attend college online.  Embracing online education for many students addresses the challenges the system faces, both financially and in terms of physical space.

Online learning is an affordable option. Tuition at Capella University, an online, accredited university, for example, runs to $930 for a 3-credit Bachelor of Science course. That figure does not take into account any financial aid or scholarship grants. At UMassOnline, an online division of the University of Massachusetts, undergraduate courses range from $425 to $1,200 in cost regardless of a student’s residency. This often works out to be less costly than enrolling in and taking a full-time program at one of the University’s physical campuses.

North Carolina has come up with a different creative option. Its Learn and Earn Online program allows students to take college courses online when they are in high school and earn an associate degree or up to two years of college credits.

Online learning at the postsecondary level is booming as students find it to be a great option for their needs. The University of Phoenix is perhaps the best-known disruptor in the space. Its online enrollment has grown rapidly. According to the Babson Survey Research Group, the percentage of students at U.S. postsecondary institutions taking at least one online course doubled between 2002 and 2006. The rapid growth has continued as 3.9 million students took at least one online course during the fall 2007 term.

With California facing an increasingly gloomy fiscal future, it is time to figure out innovative ways to do more with less. The concerns of California’s children must be paramount as we consider different options. There are many opportunities that the introduction of online learning offers—not only for those being turned away from the system but also for those admitted currently to the CSU system. Online learning streamlines the delivery of learning, which can increase its quality and consistency. It is affordable. And it allows for customization for an individual’s needs.

Don’t slam the door in these would-be students’ faces. Open up a learning pathway for them that has no doors at all.

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.