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An Academic Leader's Perspective On a Disruptive Product

The Internet and other new-media technologies have the potential to change distance learning (DL) into a force that could alter the face of higher education. As the provost of a large private university, I am deeply involved with trustees, faculty, and other administrators in developing strategies to respond to this new challenge. One of the key steps in such an exercise is to imagine the potential impacts of Internet-Mediated DL (IMDL) and other new-media on one's own educational markets and internal organization. This article will address a number of issues and themes I have identified as possible effects of IMDL. Some of these are logical extensions of existing situations, while others have a "blue sky" component appropriate to situations where revolutionary change is possible. My focus is on "traditional" colleges and universities, that is, institutions of higher learning primarily operating in one physical location with a focus on educating full-time students. A four-year undergraduate curriculum lies at the heart of all of these collegiate institutions, with universities adding graduate and professional training as well.

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen describes new technologies as either sustaining or disruptive to an industry group. A sustaining technology enables an industry to improve existing products. A disruptive technology plays a more dramatic role. Disruptive technologies initially lead to "inferior" products by the usual standards of the industry, but offer a markedly different set of benefits and a lower cost structure. Initially, customers and producers in the established market reject the new technology as inadequate. However, new companies pick up this technology and apply it to emerging markets viewed as unimportant by the mainstream. Soon demand for the new disruptive technology in these emerging markets drives and enables improvements to it until it reaches a quality level that meets the expectations of the mainstream market. At this point, mainstream customers perceive the disruptive technology as providing a superior product, because it brings additional benefits compared to the establishe d technology. Given its lower cost structure, the disruptive technology then rapidly displaces the established products, and leads to revolutionary change in the industry.

Parallels abound between the present situation in higher education and Christensen's description of a situation open to a disruptive technology. IMDL, although potentially radically more powerful than conventional DL, is generally dismissed on established campuses as an inferior form of education. Nevertheless, IMDL brings a number of new benefits not seen in traditional classroom teaching, including convenience, scalability, worldwide access, and lower cost structure. Other institutions, ranging from community colleges to the University of Phoenix, have demonstrated that there is a huge and rapidly growing IMDL market among adult learners, a market largely ignored by traditional colleges and universities. This provides a perfect market in which to improve the capabilities of the new technology. If we add that higher education is a $240 billion-per-year market in the United States, it is obvious that there is a major impetus to improve IMDL.

IMDL can certainly be a sustaining product for higher education, because it will enable us to perform many of our existing functions better. But, it has the potential to be a disruptive product as well as one that can change the way we do business in dramatic ways. In what follows, I first briefly describe the sustaining nature of IMDL. I then consider the more challenging subject of ways in which IMDL can act as a disruptive technology, especially to our markets and to our market shares. Following that, I consider how aspects of IMDL may change campus programs and governance and affect brand value. Finally, I consider the role of for-profits in this new environment.

IMDL AS A SUSTAINING EDUCATIONAL FORCE

The Internet can greatly extend the power and scope of the familiar types of DL that now use television. In its most sophisticated current formulation, DL involves TV cameras transmitting and filming a live class, while students at remote sites are connected to the classroom by telephone or two-way video. The distant students can then interact much as if they were in the classroom. Tapes of that class are then shown on some regular schedule, enabling students to repeat lessons or catch up on a missed class.

IMDL improves and extends this model of DL in dramatic but sustaining ways. The most basic change is the direct replacement of TV by the Internet in transmitting DL classes to distant students. Use of computers with mounted television cameras enables every student to have a two-way video connection to a synchronous class. Filmed classes can be downloaded on demand for asynchronous study, freeing the student from the constraints of scheduled TV broadcasts. More important, once the program has moved to the Internet and the desktop computer, powerful options to improve the learning experience become available. The combination of computer and Internet makes possible nonlinear learning strategies, in which students move from subject to subject in their own time and in their own order.

Courses following this approach must be organized differently from the traditional lecture course and generally involve an "unbundling" of usual faculty roles. The knowledgeable professor defines the material to be taught; experts in multimedia pedagogy create the structure of the course, technical people implement it; and assessment experts evaluate the course's success in enabling students to learn. The resulting course may contain lectures by the professor who defined the course, a multiplicity of experts lecturing on specific points, or lectures by a hired presenter to reinforce the course's concepts, or it is also possible the course may have no "talking heads" at all. These approaches appear to have great potential to be relatively scalable to quite large audiences without changing the basic paradigm.

IMDL is also a sustaining technology when used to open or improve interaction with various constituencies of universities. Examples of this are online courses directed at alumni or at high school seniors already admitted to the university. However, IMDL becomes a disruptive technology when it enables one organization to access a constituency that previously belonged to another.

IMDL AS A DISRUPTIVE EDUCATIONAL FORCE

In The Winner-Take-All Society, Frank and Cook point out the very best students in this country increasingly seek entry into a small number of highly prestigious universities and colleges because of the market value of their diplomas. The number of students who can actually get into these prestigious schools has always been limited by the size of their geographically determined campuses, so that large numbers of very good students are forced to go to campuses somewhat lower on the perceived prestige scale. As a consequence, there exists a distribution of talent across our spectrum of colleges and universities. The equilibrium of this system, ages old, can be destabilized by IMDL. Frank and Cook note that "on the supply side, the ultimate source of a mass winner-take-all market is that the services of the best performers can be reproduced, or 'cloned,' at low additional cost." By removing limitations on the number of students who can be taught by a top institution or a star professor at any one time, IMDL has the potential to exacerbate greatly the winner-take-all tendencies of higher education, thus becoming a very disruptive product for all but the most-highly ranked institutions.

Of course, traditional colleges and universities contribute to the education of undergraduate students in more ways than simply by teaching courses. For example, they provide a very important transitional social structure that helps high school students become adults and citizens, and they enable "networking" with peers who can be very important in later life. Thus, many educators argue that there are limits to the degree to which IMDL can be disruptive to traditional institutions. However, if we divide the roles of most of our undergraduate institutions roughly into three categories--social growth, education, and credentialing--it is clear that individual undergraduates will weigh those components differently in choosing their educational options. Were new options to appear for obtaining the same credential--perhaps from more prestigious institutions than the student normally would consider--we might well see some significant behavioral changes as students evaluated these options within the context of their own relative priorities.