After I write a paper, or a blog post, or a tweet even – it is common practice to read it through. Not just to pcik up typos, or to rethink my legendarily – and, infuriatingly to press office friends, needlessly – complex sentence structure: but to ensure that what I have written actually makes sense and doesn’t contradict itself.
It is the latter of these that Clayton “Disruption” Christensen omits in a recently published screed over at the Boston Globe. CC, for those just joining this ongoing tale, has form in pivoting away from his ideological love-child and declaring that the the future of education is “hybrid“.
“Hybrid” – in this context, is using technology alongside traditional classroom based instruction. It’s a retreat from the wider “disruption” idea that lower-quality, low-cost provision will undercut existing courses and institution, in that it sees the institutions as being complicity in their own disruption. (again, we’re in Von Hippel territory, where innovation is driven by actors already in this space.)
But anyway. Read it through and answer this question: does Christensen think that MOOCs have failed or succeeded in disrupting education?
He starts of suggesting that it is too early to say – a fairly weak claim that “[the MOOC] potential to disrupt is only just beginning to be seen“.
But a few paragraphs later we have “Without even competing directly as true low-cost substitutes, MOOCs have managed to generate price competition previously unheard of among traditional campuses“. MOOCs, apparently are responsible for all cost reductions in higher education.
That’s a hell of a claim. MOOCs did all that? But it gets worse:
“Free access to content from prestigious institutions revealed that content didn’t need to be proprietary”
Let’s ignore, for the sake of clarity, that this is proprietary content, owned jointly by said prestigious institutions and MOOC platforms. Let’s also ignore the fact that it is not reusable content, in that you need to seek permission to reuse a MOOC video (and why, seriously would you want to – it is not what it has been designed to do?). Let’s talk textbooks. Let’s talk academic papers.
Proprietary content is, like it or not, a part of education despite the efforts of the likes of David Wiley and David Porter to develop OER textbooks. And, most likely, it always will be. Different content formats and ownership structures will likely establish themselves – but all of these are windows into the decidedly non-proprietary sum of human knowledge. Unless we get the wholesale IP reform I am hoping for, we’re stuck with paying (at some point, in some way) for the efforts of those who curate and display this knowledge.
Same paragraph:
“Despite the intense trepidation that technology would somehow replace teachers, it became clear that MOOCs didn’t preempt interaction; instead, they forced more contact and accountability on both the student and the teacher.”
MOOCs actively preempt interaction, contact and accountability between the student and the teacher.!This is why there’s all the (nonsensical) talk about AI, and all those experiments with peer assessment. MOOC courses are pretty expensive to develop, but the one key cost saving as against traditional provision is that you can run much higher staff:student ratios because students cannot contact their tutors. (Let’s leave whether or not this is a good student experience to one side for now). So a completely false statement.
“Faculty have also been forced to reassess how and why they teach the way they do. Some professors began experimenting with alternative models, such as flipped classrooms and other blended-learning techniques by taking advantage of readily available, open, online materials.”
Forced to experiment. Forced. Again Christensen displays a terrifying ignorance of the actual reality of modern academic teaching, which has been using flipped-classroom (seriously… “do the reading, come to the seminar” and blended learning are widespread) and related techniques for a long time. This experimentation comes largely from academic teaching staff taking pride in their work and seeking to improve.
“Udacity, for its part, should be applauded for not burning through all of its money in pursuit of the wrong strategy. The company realized — and publicly acknowledged — that its future lay on a different path than it had originally anticipated. Indeed, Udacity’s pivot may have even prevented a MOOC bubble from bursting.”
*applauds* Udacity for totally burning through a hell of a lot of other peoples money in pursuit of the wrong strategy and getting Thomas Friedman to hype it out of all proportion.
I’m not sure that the #thrunpivot has prevented a MOOC bubble from bursting. Enough people seem to be investing time and money in ensuring the bubble does not burst to keep it inflated for a few years yet before venture capital moves on. But here Christensen is implicitly agreeing that Udacity was right to move away from competing directly with institutions, not saying that the MOOC movement has been successful at anything other than generating blog posts and sarcasm.
“Oddly, bubbles occur when too many people are too right about the potential of something like MOOCs. The personal computer bubble of 1984 and the dot-com bubble from 1999 to 2002 epitomize what’s known as “capital market myopia,” when investors ignore the logical implications of their individual investments in the same business category. MOOCs could have easily fallen into a similar trap — it’s difficult to imagine all the organizations receiving the enormous, collective investment in online learning ultimately succeeding.”
This is too good. Because everyone was *right* about the potential of the MOOC the MOOC did not achieve this potential. So if we all stop being *right* about the need to end the adjunctification of education and raise state funding for HE then it will happen?
I’d say there is – maybe – a space for one or two “MOOC “platforms offering adult-learning style course and selling tat alongside to pay the hosting bills. Maybe. But it is not a disruption simply because it is not attractive enough an offer to draw customers away from traditional education.
“In all likelihood, companies like Coursera and Udacity — Harvard and MIT’s offering, edX, operates as a nonprofit — that started out as MOOC providers will eventually move away from certain qualities of the unfortunate acronym. “Massive” and “open” are not particularly conducive to viable or sustainable business models.”
Well there we have it, the Massive Open Online Course is the future. This, if we are honest, is an admission that the MOOC does not work in this arena. What we are left with is the less exciting proposition that “if prestigious institutions continue to give us lots of exclusive content we can sell it cheaper and to more people than the institutions can.”
Christensen tails off with some nonsense about courses not meeting the needs of employers, as if that were somehow the reason that wages are stagnating and and opportunities drying up for highly trained and skilled graduates.
For all of the bombast around disruption as a theory it is a pretty bleak prognosis. Consumers make choices primarily driven by cost, it goes. Education is all about future benefit in employment. Employment in 3-4 years will look pretty similar to employment now, and employers are best placed to identify any changes.
Maybe the time has come, in these less than certain times, to replace the theory of disruption with something less certain of a future that looks much like a more miserable version of the present. Maybe employers – currently engaged in hiring less, laying off more and deskilling elsewhere, are not best placed to consider the future of employment. Maybe tuition fees are high by political choice, and we need a change of politics to lower them.
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