Disruption: Coming Soon to a University Near You

It’s becoming a familiar story, university experiences are increasingly being characterized by: impractical learning, out-of-touch faculty, exorbitant tuitions, time-wasting requirements and diminishing probabilities of employment.

At the same time, we are living in an era when many of our heroes — Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, just to mention a few — are university drop-outs, calling into question the validity of the university path for advancement in some of the most exciting realms of our society. Not surprisingly, we are beginning to see widespread frustration crystalizing into a variety of efforts to unseat the “monopoly position” that university education has traditionally held on job-seeking preparation, and replace it with different, often less-costly alternatives. Most of these, if we are honest, have not been the solutions that were hoped for: for-profit schools have been criticized for low-selectivity in admissions, poor graduation rates among students and low employment prospects upon completion; sponsored “drop-out” programs, such as those initiated by entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel are still in their infancy, but at a time when the world is crying out for more thoughtful, insightful, and ethical business leaders, to diminish their exposure to the sorts of philosophical broadening that universities excel at would appear to be bad timing at least; experiential learning is still under-represented in university curricula; and remote learning, like home-schooling, has tended to be lonely, and reactive, rather than social and interactive.

Recently, disruption guru, and Harvard Business School Professor, Clay Christensen has co-authored [with Henry J. Eyring] a book on The Innovative University, which my Forbes.com colleague Steve Denning has reviewed along with an interview with the authors. The message of this book is that “disruption” is a valid concept in the education industry, and the example provided is Brigham Young University at Idaho, which is offering what I would call an “industrialized” alternative approach to education that streamlines the acquisition of knowledge, and reduces the time and costs involved compared to that of the leading incumbent universities, such as Harvard. Christensen and Eyring offer this as evidence of incipient disruption, and it might well be, but the real threat to the prevailing model of education is likely to come from more exotic sources.

Science-fiction writer William Gibson is famously known for the observation that “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed,” which when it comes to disruptive innovation are probably the truest words ever uttered. If we follow Gibson’s lead, and consider lead users who are struggling to redefine the nature of the education industry, where we should be looking, I believe, is to such fundamentally non-traditional, technology-assisted efforts as the TED lectures, the Kahn Academy, Stanford’s amazing prototype “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (with its 160,000 enrollees), or to the forthcoming MITx initiative. Each of these is a “lead-user” initiative, authored by individuals or groups less interested in competing in the new industry’s wave of offerings as they are in solving their own problems [although, to be fair, both Stanford and MIT are very much incumbent leaders in the industry, but one gets the sense that maintaining industry leadership was not the primary motivation for these initiatives -- they were and are prototypes]. At some point, perhaps even “augmented reality” will become a part of future educational offerings? All of this is very different than the prevailing offerings, as disruption should be, and threaten to challenge some of the most sacred of assumptions regarding learning, as disruption should do.

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Disruption: Coming Soon to a University Near You - Forbes