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?

There is a great encapsulation of the potential of online learning on TV and the Internet right now in the form of this advertisement for Kaplan University. In it, James Avery (known to many as Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air) stands before students in a conventional college classroom and apologizes for how the system has failed them—and suggests a brighter way forward.

One governor who seems to understand the potential of this disruption is Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. In his State of the State address, he called for a firm cap on higher education tuition and challenged Minnesota’s colleges and universities to deliver 25 percent of their courses online by 2015.

As we’ve pointed out many times, it is a disruptive innovation that will solve the problem of affordability in higher education. The Department of Justice, for example, did not lower computer prices by busting IBM’s monopoly and pitting mainframe against mainframe. Affordability came through disruption in the form of the personal computer. The same is true in higher education. Asking colleges to hold down costs is unlikely to transform anything; giving more grants to students won’t transform the situation either. Teaching and online universities or other such disruptions are what will transform the landscape and deliver affordability.

A question, however, is if the existing universities and colleges will be capable of doing this. Although they may be able to port their courses to an online environment, truly transforming their business model and making it less costly will likely mean they have to set up an autonomous division with different resources, processes, and priorities from the existing organization. The challenge contained in Pawlenty’s speech—and the ask to require Minnesota high school students to take at least one course online before they graduate—moves the needle forward at least.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Obama made education a cornerstone of his remarks—and properly so given the urgent need to improve education in this country. Obama also made a point of saying that it isn’t enough just to give education more resources; schools also need more reform. This echoes a piece that Clay and I authored last week. Obama elaborated that offering preschool options isn’t enough, for example. We have to continue to improve them, he said, as well as cut “education programs that don’t work.”

We hope that concrete action follows this encouraging rhetoric. One thing we remain worried about is that the money in the stimulus package targeted for schools will be used to fund a continuation of the status quo. This is borrowed money. Charging education isn’t the same thing as changing it. Budgetary crises sometimes compel us to adopt disruption—which can lead to wholesale transformation of a system to something that serves many more people far better and far more affordably.

A point that Obama also touched upon in the speech is the fact that the price of tuition for post-secondary education is higher than ever. This is a big problem. But as we’ve pointed out in many posts on this site (here and here, just to give two examples), the solution isn’t to subsidize tuition to expensive colleges through scholarships or loans. If we do that, all we’re doing once again is charging education, not changing it. We haven’t made the system any less expensive; someone is still paying for it.

Industries only become more affordable through disruption. We need teaching universities and online universities to take more market share with a more affordable model to bless the lives of many more people. Subsidies will only delay the transformation to models like Andrew Jackson University and StraighterLine.

Fred Barnes interviewed Jeb Bush for the Wall Street Journal’s weekend interview, and in the article Barnes reveals what Florida’s former governor is reading at the moment on his Amazon Kindle—Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

This is yet again another flattering moment for us, but the whole interview is worth reading. As Barnes says it, “[Bush is] an unorthodox Republican who latches onto reform ideas wherever he finds them.”

Bush makes some thought-provoking points throughout the piece. He says rightly that education should move beyond Carnegie units to a mastery-based system. This is one of the most promising things online learning can bring, and it is something that should be embedded in policy for all online learning programs. He also recognizes the potential of online learning to move us toward a customized, student-centric system:

“‘It’s not based on seat time,’ he says. ‘It’s whether you accomplished the task. Now we’re like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don’t have a flourishing education system that’s customized. There’s a whole world out there that didn’t exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don’t cast young people aside.’”

Bush also praises Meg Whitman later in the piece as someone who would be a good governor because, among other things, she “lived and managed and led through the disruptive changes that are going on in our lives.”

As the governor during the initial growth of the biggest disruptive innovation in education policy in the form of the Florida Virtual School, he is probably in one of the better positions to know.

An interesting question in higher education is could a series of established colleges ever lose enough volume of students to go out of business? Tamar Lewin talked about the phenomenon in a New York Times article that we blogged about last week.

Turns out, we don’t really need to debate the question. It’s happened.

According to the MSNBC article, “Could independent colleges be the next bubble?”,  157-year old Antioch College decided to “suspend operations” at its flagship campus this past June. The article says, “Home builders and banks aren’t the only ones facing economic headwinds these days. America’s undercapitalized independent colleges are staring at a spiral of major threats to solvency as penny-pinching students and parents consider cheaper options, and funding sources dry up. As a result, they could be the next bubble industry to pop.”

When we cite disruptions in the higher education space—such as teaching universities, community colleges, and online universities—a big question is do they have the room to continue to move up-market given the aid in donations and federal dollars established universities tend to receive? It’s a good question. Federal loans and grants, for example, allow families and students to avoid making quality-cost tradeoff decisions they would make ordinarily in a normal marketplace. This has the effect of propping up high-cost higher education institutions that otherwise might lose market share—and stifling lower-cost options.

This example suggests, however, that disruptive players can ultimately overcome this market distortion. Interestingly, just as we suspect that budget crunches in the years ahead will accelerate the adoption of online learning in high schools, so too will these same pressures likely exert a similar effect in the higher education market.

In my last post, I wrote about an article by Tamar Lewin of the New York Times that talked about the escalating costs of traditional universities in the U.S.

Lewin has written a string of these articles. Another one, also highlighting the escalating costs of traditional universities in the U.S., points to a different solution from my previous post. This one, “Going Off to College for Less (Passport Required)” shows students making a rational tradeoff for a different experience for less money—by going overseas.

In a third article, Lewin writes about how many private colleges are worrying about a dip in enrollment. For those universities whose budgets are driven by tuition dollars, this will have a significant negative impact. As of December, according to a survey by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, roughly two-thirds of 371 private institutions said “they were greatly concerned about preventing a decline in enrollment.”

At a time of tightening budgets, applications to the more affordable state universities are higher, but states like California and Florida are having to cap enrollment numbers. I wrote about this earlier here.

A key takeaway? Many existing institutions will be hurt, but in the long run, let disruption take its course so we can find better, lower cost arrangements for these students.

A fourth article by Lewin is equally fascinating—and provides a possible hint of how this could unfold. Titled Israeli Entrepreneur Plans a Free Global University That Will Be Online Only, it talks about Shai Reshef’s plans to start the University of the People and to leverage open courses and social networking to offer a robust online university experience. I’ve speculated about this before (here for example)–saying open courses weren’t by themselves disruptive as offered by MIT and Yale, for example, but if an entrepreneur came along and patched them together into a degree with some other services around it, they could be quite an enabler for a monumental disruption. What do you think about this?

For those from the College Board and the like who want to see 55 percent of Americans attaining postsecondary credentials and realize affordability is important (see the report Coming to Our Senses), note that subsidies from third parties likely won’t help us in the long term because they won’t address the fundamental cost structures at play; allowing disruption to work and having lower cost options move in will.

A report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education highlights the spiraling cost increases of traditional four-year universities compared to the rise in family incomes over the period from 1982 to 2007. The New York Times writes about the report in the article, “College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.”

The authors of the report are understandably concerned that if the cost of college keeps rising at this pace even when accounting for financial aid, it will become unaffordable for most Americans, which will hurt them and the overall country severely.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” the reporter quotes Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education, as saying.

The natural implication is that we need more subsidies so people can afford these traditional schools and presumably pressure to get colleges to beat down these costs.

I’ve written about this on this blog before (see this post for example). History shows that trying to make a product or service affordable by beating down on high-cost competitors won’t do the trick. In essence, this was the philosophy the Department of Justice took when it broke up the IBM monopoly in the 1970s. It turns out though that costs for computing fell not when a high-cost organization was told to reduce costs and become more competitive, but instead when disruptive competitors—most notably in the form of personal computer companies—entered the market. Disruption brings affordability.

There is a much sounder strategy in trying to reduce costs of higher education. Rather than giving more subsidies to prop up traditional universities, allow students and families to make more rational tradeoffs in their education. Allow them to choose disruptive options for higher education—like teaching universities, community colleges, and online universities instead of the traditional research universities—that both meet their specific needs and are more affordable. If we allow for this process to occur, despite the continuing cost trajectories of our leading universities, education won’t be unaffordable in 25 years.