Ehrhardt blog series on Disruptive Innovation in EducationMarch 27, 2012

generation z

You may not recognize this woman’s face, but you have probably heard about her exploits.

Molly Katchpole is the woman who took on Bank of America -- and won. After a very publicized online petition, Molly helped pressure the bank to drop its proposed $5 debit card fee in 2011.

What you may not know is that one Fortune 500 company wasn’t enough for this consumer rights advocate. Just a few months later, Molly took on Verizon wireless and its proposed $2 fee for online bill payments. It took just two hours for Molly to enlist 50,000 people in her cause and only one day to force Verizon to cancel the new fee.

Both protests and subsequent petitions were made possible by social media and the online protest site, change.org.

Sounds exciting, Mike, but what does all of this have to do with school?

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'd like to share some stories about what has been happening at the intersection of technology and social development that is profoundly impacting education.

There is a lot to take in, so in the tradition of the serialized novel I'm planning on blogging about this topic over the course of the next month or so. I hope to introduce everybody to the research of Clayton Christensen and Don Tapscott, two authors who have done a lot of thinking about disruptive technology and the shape of our youth culture. In the end, I'll share some examples of how teachers are adjusting their classrooms to fit the learning styles of "Generation Z" students and the demands of a 21st Century

workplace.  

March 31, 2012

like this?

Molly Katchpole isn’t the only one “rallying the troops” online. We are living in an era of instant digital feedback. Just this morning, Jan Hoffman wrote in the New York Times about the growing use of “clickers” to provide instant feedback in classrooms, on cruise ships, and even to speed up sorority elections.

Amazon.com pioneered the concept of online customer reviews and rankings of products, a trend that is now being leveraged across nearly every area of consumer life -- for restaurants (Yelp), movies (Rotten Tomatoes), or travel (Trip Advisor).

Even our personal opinions and preferences are subject to rankings via Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button, which studies now show can influence buying decisions as well.

Of course, the rise in acceptance and use of online reviews and rankings has inevitably given way to charges of manipulation.

Even things that many feel are “un-rankable” have succumbed to the trend. U.S. News and World Report’s controversial but wildly popular college rankings include a healthy dose of “peer reputation” polling in their overall formulas. A few months ago, many New York newspapers caused an uproar when they published individual rankings of New York City teachers.

Behind the scenes, however, students have been ranking their teachers for years on the "Rate My Teachers” web site.

Most adults reading this blog have probably consulted an Amazon.com review to buy a book or used feedback on a travel website to make a decision on where to stay for a weekend. And, I’d bet that most of us probably feel uncomfortable about some of the ways that young people are embracing

social media and rankings, including a recent fad for young girls to post videos of themselves with the question “Am I Ugly?”

While some of these trends can cross moral or ethical lines, social and business uses of technology and the impact of peer review or crowd sourcing will no doubt impact the educational landscape in the near future.

In my next post, we’ll begin to unpack the concept of “Disruptive Technology” before moving on to examine how the digital lives of our youth will lead to new expectations for our schools.  

April 10, 2012

disruptive innovationIn a series of blog posts, we’ve begun to discuss how new technologies, coupled with the expectations of our youngest students, are combining to reshape the landscape of K12 education.

To get things started, today we are going to begin to unpack the concept of disruptive innovation. 

On January 19, 2012 -- after 131 years as an American icon -- Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Unable to make the transition from traditional to digital film, the company’s main asset today is its portfolio of patents.

Of course, even if Kodak had been able to make the change to digital photography fast enough, the market may still have been quicker. The improving quality of camera phones and their ubiquity have made them much more popular than digital cameras, and some speculate that the digital camera market might be dead in five years time.

In a twist of irony, the new “popular kid on the block” Instagram has made its mark by going retro, putting filters on its

photographs to make them feel older – harkening back to the glory days of Kodak. Yesterday, the iPhone app company with fewer than 10 employees but 30 million users was sold to Facebook for $1 billion dollars.

(One of the 20-something cofounders of this

new media darling is a graduate of my former K-12 school in Brazil, but that is a subject for another post.)

The now popular academic term for this process is: Disruptive Innovation. Coined by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, a disruptive innovation most often leverages technology to create a new market that goes on to disrupt (or often replace) an existing market.

We can stay in the technology market to understand how quickly this can happen. 

The chart above is a comparison of the stock prices of Apple and RIMM over the last 12 years. RIMM is blue and Apple is red. RIMM is the maker of the once world-beating Blackberry – so popular that at one point it was called the Crackberry. You can follow that trend to its peak in late 2008.

What happened since then? The iPhone happened. When it was first launched in 2007, the device quickly captured the fancy of consumers, but the Blackberry remained a stalwart for businesses – preferred for its security and enterprise management software. Over time, however, the iPhone began to change the way we used cell phones. They became so essential that the traditional firewall of business vs. consumer use was slowly dismantled. Today, this trend – called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) – is one of the biggest in business. Just a few days ago, the CIO of IBM pledged to eventually support the personal technology device of every one of its 440,000 worldwide employees. 

That’s disruptive!

Need more examples of how this works in other industries? Try finding a Blockbuster video rental store. Think of what Amazon did to Borders. 

At its heart disruptive innovation is about more than newer and better technology – it is about using technology to think about and do things differently.

In my next post in this series, we’ll look at three disruptive concepts that are having a direct impact on education.

April 22, 2012

death of distanceIn my last post in the series on educational technology, I described the concept of disruptive innovation – or the impact that technology can have on an industry or specific business.

To illustrate this, I want to explore three ways in which technology is disrupting education, which I will describe as:

1. The Death of Distance,2. The Long Tail,3. and the opening of New Markets.

The phrase “The Death of Distance” was first coined in 1995 to describe the impact technology would have on communication. It has since expanded to explain the impact that other technologies are having on sales, marketing, and manufacturing. 

To better understand the concept, think about the impact that Amazon has had on retail shopping or the impact that foreign call centers have had on the "help desk" industry. A recent series in the New York Times used Apple to illustrate the how much manufacturing has gone global. While Apple employs 43,000 people in the US and 20,000 people overseas, nearly 700,000 people work for contractors that make the iPhone and iPad – mostly overseas. 

The article included a now famous snippet of a conversation between Steve Jobs and President Obama, in which the President asked Jobs what it would take to make the iPhone or iPad in the US. “These jobs are not coming back,” Jobs told him flatly.

In education, the explosion of online learning can be use to illustrate the Death of Distance in action.

Studies from the Babson Research Group and Ambient Insight, graphed below, indicate the adoption of online learning will only grow. By 2014, 80% of college students are projected to take at least one course online. Research also predicts that by 2015, there will be the same number of college students in “exclusively online” schools as those in “exclusively face-to-face” schools.

The death of distance for education means that students no longer need to be in the same physical space as their instructors. While independent study and correspondence courses have been around forever, new methods for instruction online are making courses more available, more interactive, and thus more attractive for a much larger population.

In the same way that industry has been irrevocably changed by globalization of the manufacturing process, online learning has moved well beyond the “fad” that it was once called. 

In my next posts we'll look at how the Long Tail and opening of New Markets are powering this disruptive trend. 

April 24, 2012

the long tailThe second disruptive trend in education is something that has been coined “The Long Tail.” The statistical term was re-crafted and popularized in a 2004 Wired article by Chris Anderson in reference to Internet commerce – specifically as a business strategy of selling a few popular items in large quantities as well as a large number of niche items to a smaller customer base.

The Internet allows these strategies to flourish because it allows a company like Amazon to reach a global audience of consumers for their niche products (like the book "Fibromyalgia and Chronic Myofascial Pain: A Survival Manual, 2nd Edition") as well as a few blockbuster items (like the Kindle).

Individuals can also take advantage of The Long Tail. The YouTube sensation “Charlie Bit My Finger” took a simple home movie and allowed it to reach nearly 500,000,000 viewers. Estimates now indicate that Charlie’s family has earned $500,000 from the ads that surround the video. 

In education, The Long Tail is manifesting itself in two ways:

Providing a large number products to fewer peopleSchools can leverage online partnerships to expand their catalogs and provide unique learning opportunities to just a few students. At Marshall, our partnership with the Virtual High School allows us to offer high quality course offerings to our students that are not feasible in another model. One of our teachers offers a course in VHS (in our case, German Language and Culture) and our students have access to 140 courses taught by other teachers in the collaborative. All courses are taught by real teachers, in an interactive online class that is limited to 25 students. This means that if only one of our students wants to take "Folklore and Literature of Myth, Magic and Ritual" they can -- and they'll have class with students from around the US and the world. 

Scaling a few products to a huge audienceThe Long Tail also allows individual teachers to reach a mass market of students in ways never possible before – even in the biggest universities. Last year Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun impulsively decided that he’d open up his Artificial Intelligence class to the whole world. In the end, his course enrollment topped 160,000 from more than 190 countries, with more students enrolled in Lithuania than all the students enrolled at Stanford.

 

The success of this experiment led Thrun and some colleagues to start a new school, called Udacity, where he expects a single course enrollment could top 500,000.

Another experiment hatched in Stanford’s computer science department has been called Coursera, and it will offer courses taught by professors at Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan – all for free.

The business models of these new professor-driven schools are still evolving … but we’ve seen how scalability and eyeballs can transform free products into huge moneymakers (see, Google). 

April 28, 2012

new marketsThe third technological disrupter for the education industry will be economics. The theory of disruptive innovation says that for a new innovation to be “disruptive” it must create a new market for that product or service – not simply displace companies that fall behind in adopting new technologies. The mass production of automobiles is often cited as an example of disruptive innovation, because that innovation lowered the cost enough to make the car affordable to a population that would not have been able to afford it before the price changes.

In education, we are seeing tremendous price pressures. College tuition has increased beyond the rate of inflation for years. Prior to the global financial crisis, increases were averaging 6% and since they’ve been in the mid-4% range. 

With the total cost for a year at a private four-year college approaching $43,000 in 2011, it is no wonder the cost of college and the availability of college loans has become such a significant political issue. 

While costs for in-state public universities are considerably less, the data shows that only half of students are graduating from college within six years – unfortunately causing many to question the value of the investment altogether.

Cost, accessibility, and debt are some of the reasons why there is such interest in the experimentation with alternative schools that I discussed in the earlier post on The Long Tail.

Interestingly, one source of innovation in the secondary

education market can also be traced back to Stanford -- which has recently opened an accredited, degree-granting online high school. This private school is limited to gifted and talented students, but perhaps the most eye-popping feature is its tuition. In a world where brand-name independent school tuition on the East Coast can exceed $40,000 a year, Stanford set its tuition at $15,000. This model is opening up new markets to students from around the world in the same way that Virtual High School courses can offer elective opportunities to students at Marshall that would not be available without the

program or the way 40% of US high schools that don't offer AP courses can now offer online options to fill real program shortcomings. 

In the public sector, online charter schools have begun to compete for students across the United States. In Minnesota, the Department of Education recognizes 29 online schools. When the Montana Digital Academy opened its virtual doors two years ago, 200 students were taking classes. At the end of this year, it is projected online student enrollment will top 7,000 students. The average virtual school growth rate in the US is between 20% and 45% a year. These changes are coming at a time when 30 states are providing less per-pupil funding to their public schools than four years ago. 

There is considerable controversy around the for-profit sector that has been behind many of the new online charter schools, however, with a US Department of Education study showing that online and blended learning can offer a level of quality at par or better than face-to-face instruction, economics will continue to push organizations and states to experiment with these new educational models. 

This wraps up our discussion of disruptive innovation and the three areas that will likely most impact education. In my next post, we will begin to look at how the changes in our student population (Generation X parents and their Generation Y/ Z children) will accelerate the adoption of new educational models to fit changing cultural norms. 

May 5, 2012

from above and belowWhat a difference a week makes.

Over the past month, as I’ve been writing about disruptive innovation in education and the particular impact of online technologies, the higher education landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Just last week, Harvard and MIT entered the fray with their announcement of a $60 million venture called edX.

This has prompted a flurry of commentary about the future of the university, and promoted New York Times columnist David Brooks to liken the coming changes to those that have gripped the newspaper industry. His metaphor of choice: tsunami.

Will the waves hit secondary education? Yes.

While we can expect the technologies and business models used by colleges to flow down to the secondary market, equally important are the changing expectations of students swelling from below. Simply put … if there is an innovation tsunami coming from above, there is a user volcano bubbling from below. (I promise, no more natural disaster metaphors.)

In a recent show, Jon Stewart made a humorous reference to the aging and somewhat out of touch Generation X, using a picture of a woman in large shoulder pads as the punch line.

Those Generation Xers, once the source of so much handwringing in the media for being the self-absorbed offspring of the Baby Boomers, are now parents themselves. Their children are most often referred to as Generation Z – the first fully digital generation. Generally born after the millennium, those students are now in elementary and middle school. They have only known a world with car seats, bike helmets, and organized recess. They have only known a political world with one superpower and have no direct memory of 9/ 11. They communicate via text messages rather than email and have not known a world before Google.

These students interact with each other and their world in vastly different ways than their Gen X parents, and therefore they have significantly different expectations (even if they are unable to articulate them) for how they should learn.

One of the leading researchers into Gen late Y and early Z social expectations and learning theory is Don Tapscott. In my next post, we’ll look at his “Eight Norms” for the new

May 22, 2012

eight normsOne of the most significant factors portending a coming disruption in education are the students.

Currently in elementary and middle school, our youngest students are the first to be raised in a completely wired world. While it will take generations for brains to be “rewired” by the changes happening with technology today, there are immediate realities that are having a significant impact on how we communicate and interact with each other and information.

Researcher Don Tapscott has been studying this youngest generation for

years and developed what he calls the eight norms for the net generation.

A few thoughts on each briefly.

Freedom: The Internet has opened up whole new worlds on how we buy things, where we work, how we communicate. Google encourages their work force to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing. Students get more choice than ever before, and they are coming to expect it from the most unlikely of places (school).

Customization: With digital technology and just-in-time manufacturing, it seems everything is customizable now a days. We Build Our Own Bears, get monogramed M/ Ms, and have more personalized web portals than we can keep track of.

Scrutiny: With more access to information, we expect to be able to check facts and get peer reviews on about any topic. Patients arrive for meetings with their doctors having already pre-diagnosed themselves and children have no fear of fact checking anything an adult tells them.

Integrity: Following right on the heels of scrutiny is integrity. Generation Y and Z students are idealistic and have a strong notion of social justice. We have seen service learning become integrated into the curriculums of most independent schools.

Collaboration: While adults may lament the seemingly poor social skills of our youth, behind the scene they are collaborating like never before. More importantly, because of the amount of information available at their

fingertips, students today are quick to gather information that used to take hours of time in the library. We may call it plagiarism, but might call it “sampling.”

Entertainment: This is probably the most publically lamented aspect of our recent culture. The Daily Show is a fairly sophisticated blend of entertainment and news. While it is fairly easy to recognize Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live as humor, a large number of people report getting their “news” from Jon Stewart.  

Speed: We can organize, communicate, and change things faster than ever before. For youth new to the work place, the pace of change in many larger organizations seems glacial.

Innovation: If you pull together some of the above characteristics (customization, collaboration, speed), you can understand how the net generation embraces innovation.

Whether or not you agree with all of Tapscott’s eight norms, the reality is that our youngest students are interacting with the world in a way that is fundamentally different than earlier generations. As a result, schools are dealing with both internal and external forces that are pushing for radical change.

In my next set of posts, we’ll look at some of the ways schools are embracing these new possibilities. May 20, 2012

four developmentsIn the final sets of posts on disruptive innovation, I am going to discuss four developments in education that, when combined, have the potential to dramatically impact the way education is delivered over the next decade.

As a leader of an independent school, I am often asked about what I look for most when I am evaluating a teacher or a classroom. I can answer in three words: engagement and mastery.

The best schools will helps students to see themselves as independent learners and inspire them to pursue their passions. While the quality of relationships between students and teachers is a hallmark of an engaging environment, technology has the potential to provide many new ways for student interaction, exploration, and discovery. At the end of the process, however, students must also be able to demonstrate a mastery of the skills necessary to be successful, independent learners at the next level of their education.

Area #1: Online Learning

The first area in which technology can assist with engagement and mastery is in online learning. Generation Z students are often first attracted to online learning options because they provide an opportunity to explore subject areas that might have been previously unavailable. In the first year of our partnership with the Virtual High School Collaborative, 20% of our eligible students signed up to take an online course.

Why?

They were attracted by a list of more than 130 unique course offerings, including 20 Advanced Placement courses. They were excited to have class with students in 35 different states and 43 countries.

Once engaged in online learning, students tell us that they liked having control over their schedules. They have busy lives and online courses allow them much more flexibility and fewer distractions than they find in traditional classes.

As the technology continues to improve, the quality of online courses also improves. The VHS pass rate for Advanced Placement courses is 8% above the national average, and a 2011 Babson Research survey of university chief academic officers revealed that 67% believe that educational outcomes of

online courses are as good or better than face-to-face courses.

Online learning at the college level is projected to soar, with 80% of students expected to be taking at least one course online by 2014. One year later, it is projected that there will be as many exclusively online students in college as exclusively face-to-face.

No doubt, "college prep" schools will need to begin offering students not only an opportunity to engage with new material presented in online courses but also to master the tools that will increasingly become the norm in higher education. 

May 26, 2012

mobile technologyLaptop projects have been around in schools for quite some time, but it hasn’t been until very recently that researchers have been able to gather data on the impact of providing every student with mobile technology.

Interestingly, the results would indicate that laptop projects, sometimes called 1:1 initiatives, have shown to increase not only students’ collaborative

skills but also in increasing self-directed learning. As we saw earlier, both factors are important to the expectations of Gen Y/ Z learners.

Area #2 Mobile Technology

In a meta-study of the laptop initiatives in six states (Florida, Maine, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas), researchers at the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at NC State learned:

1. Laptops increase student engagement. Interestingly, even though many of the technology-rich projects required more time of students, they reported the activities more fun and engaging.

2. The use of laptops generally had a positive impact on student achievement, writing in particular.

3. Laptops had a positive impact on creativity and higher-order thinking skills.

4. Students using laptops improved their communication and collaboration skills.

5. Researchers observed significant increases in independent inquiry and research with students using laptops.

Laptop or tablet initiatives are costly, and therefore implementation of projects must be thoughtful and well planned. Researchers have learned a

great deal of what it takes to successfully implement a 1:1 project. Most importantly, teachers must be excited and willing to make full use of the tools and begin to restructure they way they organize their classroom activities and communicate with students. 

As Marshall prepares to implement its 1:1 project, our faculty have formed a 1:1 Steering Committee and several sub-committees to prepare the groundwork. Our Professional Development sub-committee is developing a comprehensive plan to support and inspire faculty as they move forward next year. In addition, this summer several of our teachers will be attending national conferences on laptop programs. 

June 3, 2012

the flipped classroomWhile 1:1 laptop programs and online classes have been around for a while now – at least in the context of the quick changing landscape of ed tech – the current hotbed of innovation involves something called the “Flipped Classroom.”

Area #3: The Flipped Classroom

In a flipped classroom, an instructor will use technology to provide access to instruction, most often in the form of a short video-based lecture or demonstration, for viewing outside of class. In the classroom, students will then use their time to work in groups or with the instructor on projects or getting questions answered.

The most recent fuss over the flipped classroom focuses on the work of Salman Kahn, a former hedge-fund analysis who first recorded a video to help a relative do a school project. Now, the non-profit Kahn Academy has more than 3,000 lessons and 6 million visitors a month.

While the attention given to the Kahn Academy is justified, the concept of flipped instruction goes back at least a decade with research into how schools and instructors may best differentiate instruction for users, switching the focus of the classroom away from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.”

Research does indicate that students in blended courses – using traditional and technological approaches -- outperform their online or face-to-face peers. When done right, flipped classrooms should allow students more time to ask questions and more time to work at their own pace. The ultimate goal of a flipped approach is mastery.

While the Kahn Academy is mostly being used to supplement instruction and provide focused tutoring for students, many schools are trying to capture the instruction of their faculty and provide their own flipped approach. Smartboards already allow for the easy capture of white board notes, and new hardware/ software platforms such as Echo 360 and  Camtasia are making it increasingly easy for faculty to make a video of their lectures.

Of course, as any teacher will tell you, it is easy to assign homework and somewhat harder to get students to do it. Therefore, assigning the lecture as homework has its challenges if students then come to class not having seen the material … and with no questions to ask!

Nonetheless, the flipped approach has wonderful potential to offer an avenue for differentiation and individualized instruction. Students who don’t understand the material the first time have an opportunity to view it again. Students who are competent at a particular part of the curriculum can speed through a section and focus their time on more demanding work. 

June 7, 2012

just-in-time teaching

Area #4: Just-in-Time Teaching

The final area that is having an impact on the education landscape involves a term that is most often associated with manufacturing. Called “just-in-time teaching,” it is a strategy that involves web- or technology-based

assignments given just prior to the classroom instruction. Feedback from those assignments are then given to the teacher, who adjusts the lesson according to the readiness of the students in the class.

Maria Terell, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, has experimented with this strategy as part of her GoodQuestions project. The goal of the project has been to develop a more active learning environment in the classroom by having a better sense of where students are at prior to entering class. Such an approach has promise for increasing interest and mastery.

At Marshall, we have been experimenting with a different technological approach in our mathematics classes, but the underlying concept is similar … use out of class time to better assess where students are at and deliver instruction that is most appropriate to their level.

Our tool has been something called ALEKS.In the 1920s, psychologist Lev Vygotsky termed this particular space the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), defined as the difference between an individual’s ability to solve a problem alone or under the guidance of an adult or peers. By pitching instruction right at the edge of this zone, students would be guided, ever increasingly, towards more and more independent learning. One metaphor that emerged from this theory was the concept of “scaffolded learning.” Over time, a skilled instructor adjusts her lessons to fit the changing performance of the student. ALEKS was developed in the early 1990s through funding from the National Science Foundation as a result of ground-breaking research in mathematical cognitive science from professors at New York University, the University of California-Irvine, and the University of Brussels. This mathematical software uses complex Knowledge Space Theory to efficiently and accurately assess a student’s current knowledge and adapt the program’s questions to fit the exact topics or areas that a student is ready to master next. The program is currently being used by millions of students ranging in ages from the elementary years to the college level. At Marshall, our 6th grade math teacher has had all students assessed using ALEKS and has been presented with a detailed inventory of her individual students’ readiness. This powerful new tool enables her to individualize math instruction. Rather than presenting the same lesson to all students (when some have already mastered the topic), she can take the opportunity to present a lesson to one group of students while allowing the others to continue their work independently in ALEKS. Later in the unit, she then addresses the needs of those higher performing students in small group sessions while providing other more appropriate learning opportunities for the students still mastering the main concepts of the unit.In addition to maximizing the use of class instructional time, this technology has been proven to greatly increase both individual and overall cohort performance in mathematics. Marshall’s 6th grade math teacher notes, “ALEKS is the ultimate math tool for differentiation.  Students love it because they can choose what they want to learn and the immediate feedback is rewarding.  As a teacher, I feel more confident that all of my students will be challenged at their individual learning level.”The benefits of this tool can show up in test scores as well. At a previous school, I tracked four years of student

achievement in our standard Grade 8 math classroom (pre-algebra) on a nationally normed 8th grade math test. The charts below reflect a class curve, with the left side starting at the 10th percentile (nationally) and the right ending at the 100th percentile. 

The first two charts are the top are two consecutive years of testing, using a traditional method of textbook-based instruction. The bottom charts are test results after incorporating ALEKS. As you can see, the students at the lower end of the performance scale virtually disappear. Using ALEKS enabled the teacher to identify and address specific issues for students – and their performance drastically increased.