The book, “Distrupting Class” by Clayton Christensen lays out a potential future for the education industry in the United States.  Written by a Harvard Business School professor who take the approach of looking at the industry as a business in need of innovation vs. as an educator might, the balance is in favor of things that would be of strategic impact.  Dr. Christensen is the Rober and Jan Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and wrote “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “The Innovator’s Solution”.

The author begins by praising the education industry for doing more than any other industry at reinventing itself to meet the requirements placed on it by US society.  However, while the industry has been able to improve all the metrics of student success, the improvements have not been enough to satisfy the demands of the public, nor have they kept pace with the successes of other nations.

He talks about how in the early days of public education, the one room schoolhouse days, each child had to have individualized instruction because there were kids from all over the map in terms of what they needed. It was only when the goal became having a literate and informed populace and there was a shift to monolithic content delivery that things became less individual.  Now, the author estimates that less than 20% of a teacher’s time is available to help a student individually.  This amounts to less than 3 minutes per child in a class of 30.

After reviewing (and praising) the current state of the education industry, the author talks about a disruptive pattern of innovation which is emerging in education – individualized, computer-based, instruction.  The deployment of this technology, has up to now been seen as having much impact on main stream public educaiton.  But, the point is made that this is the case with all successful distruptions in their early phases.  To take hold, a disruption must compete where their is no alternative, so called “non-consumption”.  In other words, computer based instruction is taking hold where there are no alternatives.  One example is for courses like Arabic language studies where it is just not feasible to offer a class for one or two students.

The book makes a strong case for the benefits of individualized on-line / computer-based instruction.  Also called virtual schooling, the author includes a formula for predicting when virtual schools will be the norm for instruction in the US.  This starts with an estimate that approximatley 1.5% of all instruction today is delivered via individualized computer based instruction and predicts that by the school year 2019, more than 50% of all instruction will be delivered via computer.  This “S-curve” begins to grow in a non-linear manner starting in 2012, or roughly 4 years from now.

As an entrepreneur in this space, the most exciting part of the book starts on pg. 142.  “This also points to a road forward for those venture capitalists, foundations, and philanthropies that hope to invest with impact in education.”

We believe that the ideas we have for Connected Information Systems fall squarely in the zone the book identifies.

The book is an easy read and I highly recommend it to anyone working in the education industry as either a vendor serving the market or as a member of the education profession.