Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn see online education as the wave of the future, predicting that 50% of high school courses will be delivered online by the year 2019. Their article in Education Next reflects on the way producers, providers, and promoters of this concept can overcome the institutional resistance to the change – by introducting their product in a non-competitive path:
That schools have gotten little back from their investment in technology should come as no surprise. Virtually every organization does the same thing schools have done when implementing an innovation. An organization?s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is the predictable course, the logical course?and the wrong course.
The way to implement an innovation so that it will transform an organization is to implement it disruptively?not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to let it compete against ?non-consumption,? where the alternative is nothing at all.
In other words, the programs shouldn’t go head to head with classroom instructors — they should be developed for and marketed to homeschoolers, rural districts, and tutoring services first, and when they are fully accepted in those markets, traditional schools will be more likely to embrace the possibilities that the technology affords.
Unfortunately, the one issue they tiptoe around is the true Achilles heel to the proposal — how do you sell the idea of replacing career teachers in physical classrooms with a system that allows a single instructor — living, dead, or even computer-generated — to deliver the course content to millions of students.
The technology is here, and in use in North Carolina — my homeschooled son is taking an Advanced Placement course online, from a private instructor who just moved from Pennsylvania to Israel — but the institutional nut will be very, very hard to crack. Short of pandemic or some other national emergency that cripples the brick-and-mortar education facility, I don’t see this taking root nearly as quickly as Christensen and Horn predict.
