Pat Sine's List: Engaged Classrooms

• 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.
• We call innovations that sustain the leading companies’ trajectory in an industry sustaining innovations.
• A disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough improvement. Instead of sustaining the leading companies’ place in the original market, it disrupts that trajectory by offering a product or service that actually is not as good as what companies are already selling. Because the disruptive innovation is not as good as the existing product or service, the customers in the original market cannot use it. Instead, the disruptive innovation extends its benefits to people who, for one reason or another, are unable to consume the original product, so-called non-consumers.
• How should computer-based learning suppliers transform schooling? They must introduce the technology to compete against non-consumption.
• Curriculum experts who make these selections tend to be trained in the dominant pedagogical paradigm of that field, so, consciously or not, they tend to pick books that match that dominant paradigm.
• Programmers can build multiple paths into a program to adjust for a student’s progression. The student need not see whole swaths of the software that are not relevant. Integrated software solutions can both build large-scale offerings and customize for different learners. But this will not be inexpensive, or accomplished without disruption.

  • And provide for multiple learning styles without distracting by attending to all styles simultaneously.
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• The education software business will have to develop a disruptive distribution channel to reach students.
• A student struggling with a certain concept, or her parent or teacher, will be able to log on to a web site where she can find a software solution that another student, parent, or teacher developed for that specific challenge. By means of such sites, students will teach students, parents will teach parents, and teachers will teach teachers. Parents and teachers, moreover, will be able to diagnose why children are not learning and find customized instructional software written to help students who closely match their child in learning style. As content is used over time, users will rate it, as they rate books on Amazon.com and movies on Netflix. That will not happen en masse until the technology has matured, but as it does, people will gradually link together various modules to form more comprehensive classes. And then end users will pull this content, rather than have school systems push it to them from on high. With users building the content and using open-source tools, the software will be far less expensive than if it had been commercially developed from scratch.

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