Disrupting Class: Student-Centric Learning

I’m reading Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, and posting a few of my favorite passages.

From Chapter 5: The System for Student-Centric Learning —

In the first phase of disruption of the instructional system, the software will likely be complicated and expensive to build. The reasons for this can be traced to the use of the existing commercial system when marketing the software, as well as to the relative immaturity of Web 2.0 software. Within a few years, however, two factors that were absent in stage 1 that are critical to the emergence of stage 2 will have fallen into place.

The first will be platforms that facilitate the creation of user-generated content. The second will be the emergence of a user network, whose analogues in other industries would include eBay, YouTube, and dLife (for patients with diabetes and their families).

The tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classrooms. These instructional tools will look more like tutorial products than courseware. But rather than being “pushed” into classrooms through a centralized selection process, they will be pulled into use through self-diagnosis - by teachers, parents, and students.

User networks, not value-chain businesses, will be the business models of distribution. This will allow parents, teachers, and students to offer these teaching tools to other parents, teachers, and students.