Updated 3/27/1998 By Brad Cox
The following educational products seem very different on the surface because they are served by quite different institutions; post-secondary educational institutions, training academies, and organizational change consultants.
These three products seem quite different because they are provided by very different institutions. However they are similar enough that it is prudent to evolve offerings to service them as we learn rather than excluding one or the other at the outset. But since planning is simpler with a definite focus in mind, the pros and cons of various markets we might target initially are:
The issue is what customer to target, then with what sort of product. Universities such as GMU, Sylvan, and U. of Phoenix answer this the same way. The customers are individual students and the product is individual advancement in the student's career. Let's call that traditional product "Individual Learning" and distinguish that from "Organizational Learning", the product I'm advocating here.
What distinguishes Silicon Valley from the Potomac Valley isn't the educational level of individuals at all. We've just as many smart folks as they do. The communities, the organizations, institutions and cultures are different, not the individuals within them. Although people do agree that the need for change, for "organizational learning", is great, the problem is that apart from organizational change consultants, no institution offers a product that specifically targets the market need. The providers are supplying individual learning when the market demands organizational learning. Thus the customers in this market are CEO's of organizations who recognize the need for learning (eg "change") within their organizations but realize that they need external help to bring it about.
On reflection and discussion with possible clients, I believe the desire to initially focus on one market isn't as good as proceeding based on the assertion that the world wants and expects both education and training, and both service to individuals and organizations, not a choice between one or the other.
Thus we should begin as outlined in the How section, by building an inventory of sub-course modules (Tasks), then to assemble these into specific products and offer them to each market. Each offering would be surrounded by marketing collaterals (wrappers) tailored to the needs of each market (eg syllabii for liberal arts courses, advertising brochures for industrial markets, etc). Then listen to what the market tells us, thus substituting real information about what the world wants and needs for the debilitating education "versus" training debates that will, in the long run, relegate academia to the Ph.D. market alone.
Author: Brad Cox
This is a call for the creation of a new kind of university, one that is free of most of the great problems afflicting higher education today, problems that cripple academia's ability to deliver its product cost effectively.
The great hope of the world is for enlightenment. Education alone has the power to uplift humanity. It is not that we lack answers to the problems which afflict a suffering humanity today. The problem is not the lack of good answers; the problem is a failure to deliver and implement existing knowledge.
The great good news today is that technological progress has brought us to the point that information can be moved around the globe at the speed of light. It is now possible to deliver inexpensively the kind of information people need to make a better life. Specifically, you can provide the electronic equivalent of a top quality baccalaureate degree in the liberal arts to anyone with access to a computer and modem.
But the real good news goes far beyond that. It is not merely that we can speed the electronic equivalent of a sheepskin around the world; we can offer a superior product. Educational technology can do more than make it possible for thousands of people to watch some professorial talking head deliver a lecture. It can transform the educational experience, improve the speed and quality of learning. We can do more than reach out and touch someone; we can provide him personalized instruction in sound and moving color, training he can acquire at his own optimum rate.
Our overall concern is the individual human being, where he is and as he is.
Of all its many transformative effects, perhaps the greatest impact of the new technology is on the empowerment of the individual. As the individual human being becomes more powerful, institutions must give way, respond and adapt to the demands of ordinary human beings or become marginalized and die.
The new technology is changing everything, redefining all relationships. The problem is that no one human being is wise enough or knowledgeable enough to predict all that will be. We know something's happening, but we don't know what it is.
However, some things are clear. The relationships among all institutions and to individuals is changing. Our Company is predicated upon a new relationship between academia and industry. No longer can the flow of information remain essentially unidirectional, from the world of research to the world of commerce
For our part of this great change, we propose a new, closer partnership, one which benefits not only academia and industry but students as well. Close ties to the "real world" can help keep the university's instruction relevant and practical. And it will better prepare the student for a career. Specifically how we propose to establish such a new partnership is described in Appendix III.
Essentially, we propose to narrow the distance between work and study. By giving students actual experience in the workplace, they can move seamlessly from studies and their career. At the same time, returning students will bring a current, real world perspective from work to school, helping to keep instruction practical and up to date.
We anticipate that technology will create opportunities for a new and closer relationship among universities. Academia will become truly integrated; different schools will cooperate and collaborate, emphasizing each school's individual strengths. Technology will bring institutions of higher education closer, allowing them to share resources, eliminating needless duplication. Geographical barriers will be surmounted as students take the best available courses regardless of its source.
Primary and secondary education have long existed as discrete enterprises with little communication or understanding shared. New connectivity between K12 education and higher education will improve both. We predict the end of educational schools and departments. A distracting concern with pedagogy will disappear as technology produces quanta leaps ahead in learning.
An essential requirement for American society is to utterly retool its workforce. Few of the skills from the electro-mechanical era are applicable in today's careers. Generally, industry is failing to develop innovative approaches to retraining and retaining their workforce. The problem is the difficulty in knowing how to train people for jobs that don't yet exist.
Most of what we learn today will soon be irrelevant. The tools that are essential to use today's technology are becoming rapidly obsolescent. The time and distance between the cutting edge and the outmoded is compressing rapidly as technological progress accelerates. The battlefield of progress is littered with the corpses of once essential and now useless instruments: BBS's, telnet, CP/M, DOS, UUNet, gopher, archie, 8-inch drives, monochrome monitors, dot matrix printers.
What are we to do in an effort to help people cope with an onrushing future that threatens to overwhelm our capacity to cope?
There is only one sensible answer: we must become better at teaching people how to learn. The ability to learn new skills rapidly must become the quintessential virtue in a worker.
We cannot predict which technology will predominate, but we can predict that some new technology shall prevail. As we are part of a system whose operation we cannot escape, we cannot know the future. But we can be confident that it will arrive ever more rapidly.
The key to survival is adaptability. We must above all else teach people how to learn.
Technology is also changing the way individuals relate. Increasingly, we will communicate, cooperate, compete, and work with individuals beyond our narrow geographical limits. The popular myth is that computers isolate In fact, networked computers multiply opportunities for relationships.
We need to help people learn how to study and work in technology based groups.
Of particular interest to us is how technology is affecting higher education. By now, it is clear that technology is extending traditional teacher/learner relationships beyond the space/time limitations of the classroom.
It is challenging and redefining how teachers and learners relate. What is happening is nothing less than the evolution of a fully distributed global community of empowered learners. The effect of such an all-powerful intellectual apparatus cannot now be imagined, but there can be no doubt that it will be world transforming.
The distinction between evolution and design
Academia has only begun to elaborate evolutionary methods of organizational learning in practice. Human institutions evolve in a way that defies prediction, control and design. Human beings like the illusion of control but the outworking of human destiny is beyond the comprehension of any one human being.
Today's schools were defined and produced by the age of manufacturing. This now established factory model of education is shifting to a new information intensive paradigm.
Such shifts do far more than parachute newfangled whizbangs into established institutions, paradigms, and power relationships. They fundamentally challenge and transform existing institutions, paradigms, and power relationships.
The manufacturing age's infatuation with central planning and design is still very much with us today. Engineers, scientists, politicians, managers, and educational theorists still speak as if we can, should and therefore must, impose ordered design and control on unimaginably complex human systems. We want to think of such systems as being like mere steam engines or automobiles, manipulating them externally as if the designer were able to stand apart from the human process that produces them.
In our hubris, we imagine that we are able to control events. But we cannot predict the future of complex systems, much less control them.
Complex systems evolve., shaped by an interaction in which system and environment minutely adjust to each other, very much as biological organisms evolve within ecosystems.
In his book Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, Rothschild argues that the urge to emphasize design at the expense of evolution is a symptom of the pervasive influence of the industrial age on our language, thoughts and deeds. For example, when we're told that the fed wants to "put the brakes" on an "overheating" economy, someone does great violence to the complexity of a vast imponderable system, reduces it to the level of an easily controlled machine.
This does great harm beyond its distortion of language. Such an attitude invites listeners to believe that somewhere some government experts actually understand the economy and is therefore competent to control it without doing more harm than good. Virtually every economic problem from double-digit inflation to the Great Depression is traceable to this fundamental fallacy.
Increasingly, the new technology will encourage learning that challenges such industrial age conceptions of the educational process. Increasingly, it will be clear to students and instructor alike that wisdom and expertise does not reside solely in the instructor.
Great hubris exists among educators who prepare instruction for learners as a sequence of discrete steps: analysis, planning, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. This is the same model that dominated software engineering literature in the 1970s, a model inspired by the same industrial age faith in design.
Its basic flaw: it excludes the end-user from the decision-making process. This model was displaced by rapid prototyping when software customers rose in revolt to a model that virtually excludes them from the decision making process.
This is a political difference, not a technical one, for it expands the power circle to recognize that the customer has a valid role to play in design.
Author: Mark Draper