Posted on 03/13/2020 8:08:59 AM PDT by karpov
Education has lost one its most important disruptors: Clayton Christensen, PhD and distinguished professor at Harvard Business School. After a successful career as the CEO of CPS Technologies, Christensen returned to school at age 40 to earn his PhD in business from Harvard University. He became a well-known scholar, particularly for his key contributions to our understanding of innovation and disruption. Christensen died on January 23.
Possibly one of his most important predictions of disruption playing out in the marketplace is about his own industry: higher education. After accepting an offer from the University of Phoenix to teach online lectures on various business principles, Christensen began to see the tide turning in favor of online higher education. Entertainment and cost-effectiveness were the main aspects of his University of Phoenix online lectures and he saw them becoming the order of the day in online higher education.
Online higher education solves many issues that traditional colleges and universities cannot even seem to approach: A large number of low-quality professors and a short supply of high-quality professors; exorbitant costs for housing and boarding on university campuses; and the massive capital cost for underutilized buildings.
Online higher education allows for one high-quality professor to teach thousands, or even millions, of viewers. Over time, even high-quality professors will be disrupted, as Christensen points out in his 2011 book, The Innovative University:
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
It’s interesting that the article makes no mention of Christensen’s great contributions to understanding innovation and how young upstart companies defeat the old stalwarts with the publication of his 1997 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” (Harvard Business Review Press).
The book expanded on the concept of disruptive technologies, a term he coined in a 1995 article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.”
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