Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation and higher education

Renowned Harvard business professor and acclaimed author Clayton Christensen addressed the Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee this morning in the Senate building at the Utah Capitol. A Utah native, Christensen is a world-renowned expert on how disruptive technologies alter entire industries.

Drawing instructive comparisons with the steel and technology sectors, Christensen specifically addressed the disruptions taking place in higher education and how legislators can work with higher ed to help it adapt and better educate students. Christensen said online learning is an essential component in the disruption that is taking place in education, an industry that has been highly resistant to disruption previous to the fairly recent advances in online learning.

For example, Christensen explains how the current model of education is integrated from top to bottom, meaning if you want to change one part of the model, you have to change the other parts of the model to fit. Using technology, education can move to a modular model in which a student can take a particular course, taught by the best professor in the world, and get credit for that course. Instead of accrediting only institutions, accreditation organizations would accredit individual courses. The student thereby receives the best, most appropriate education without the limitations and burdensome requirements of a linear, integrated education.

Christensen encourages higher ed institutions to become hybrids, offering both on-campus and online courses, noting that this move would "extend their runway" and help them to enhance their effectiveness and maintain their competitiveness in an increasingly open and à la carte education environment. Increasingly, the focus will be, as it should, on helping students meet their individual needs instead of requiring students to follow a rigid factory model.

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[BBBsNaKe]

Clay is ma dawg yo :D He gets it.

[john dow]

Never envy, it's not a good feeling. Keep working on in instead, you can make it!

[kimothefighta]

I wish we could all just be big ASSHOLES like you!

[john dow]

Great to be a professor: you get to jibber on commonplaces and a horde of idiots will listen to you breathlessly just cause they got no brain to evaluate what it is they're actually hearing.

[john dow]

Linux isn't modular at all, in fact, far less so than Windows. What Linux is, is open source. This guy babbles and babbles on telling nothing other than banalities, commonplace, at times diluted by open nonsense.

[Juan Carlos García Leal]

Major League Stuff!!!!!!



[Sean Hutchins]

Excellent insight and observations. Clayton Christiansen brings a common sense approach to both education and business.

[Stephen Mortensen]

1 million students generating $100 profit each is $100 million profit. The current model doesn't allow for a million students, and thus must have much greater margins.

Anyway, I'd imagine that as these things progress, companies will find other standards from which to judge potential hires, and in the meantime, many of the world's intelligent people who historically have been held back solely by circumstances will have greater opportunity than ever before.

[Stephen Mortensen]

@danthedrummingman: I think that's the point, at least how I see it. These entrance requirements are often times arbitrary and/or based on measures that are far from perfect determinates of success. I'm of the belief that there shouldn't be any requirements for receiving a world-class education other than the capability of learning the material at hand. Also, the scale of these developments will allow for much smaller profit margins to generate enough profit in aggregate.

[TheIndiana1414]

The ideas here are brilliant and far reaching. Education has been stuck in the past for way too long and this talk gives me hope that my children won't have to go through the same antiquated system that I did.