After the MOOCs, the next wave of disruption

There was more than a little smugness on show when John Warner, a teacher and journalist penned his article on MOOCs ‘The non-disruption’. Warner’s point was that MOOCs had not lived up to their disruptive hype. This follows on from the declaration by Thrun (founder and CEO of Udacity), then Agarwal (CEO of edX) that ‘MOOCs are dead’.

The purveyors of this have a point, MOOCs came in on the promise to hollow out all but the highest tier of Higher Education institutions and as I’ve covered before US college numbers are virtually unchanged and applicants are determined more by macroeconomic factors than by MOOCs.

MOOCs were the first wave of disruption. Like some of the dot com companies, they are innovative — why not take a University course and put it online for everyone? But also imitative. They did largely — take a university course and put it online. Their newer products — online degrees are actually an even older product, OPM providers have been around since the dot com boom.

That’s not unusual, first waves of digitisation tend to be digital copies and it doesn’t mean they won’t be successful companies and doesn’t even prevent them being disruptive but it does make it less likely.

There are three things however that suggest we are on the cusp of the next wave of disruption in Education. Firstly, what MOOCs and other early Edtech products have shown is that Education can be digitised. Secondly, while the first wave of digitisation focused predominantly on goods (think Amazon and ebay) the second is about services many of the challenges digitising services will require will spillover to education (e.g. how to rate and trust people) how to identify specific skills. MOOC platforms, Udemy, Lynda are already marketplaces of Education but technology is enabling deeper digitisation of the Education value chain. Thirdly, much of the wave is already here — see this excellent investment heat map/periodic table from HolonoIQ.

A cursory look demonstrates both the breadth of Edtech innovations to come and that MOOCs and OPMs are but a fraction and not where the investment flow is (although they’ve received a significant amount). One particularly noteworthy example is the rise of P2P learning, the irony of this is at once its both very scalable and secondly imitates enables the classic 1:1 tutoring of the Oxford-Cambridge model — the antithesis of MOOCs.

P2P is already a thriving market in China — some just use Wechat but its not hard to imagine that platforms that can better specify skills could help people find tutors for any number of circumstances. The analyst who needs to do a valuation, the Homeowner preparing to negotiate a price — expertise could be parcelled and sold quite likely at highly lucrative levels (depending on the skill and its scarcity). A vibrant and expansive P2P market would probably require other technologies to aid it to scale.

Credentials — I’ve previously pooh-pooh’d blockchain for credentials based partly on the lack of a problem to solve in countries with developed Higher Education systems and based on its horrific energy costs. New credentials could enable the emergence of individual actors to offer their tutoring service and have a credential associated.

Assessment, tied in with that would be better methods for skill assessment to both test an individual’s ability (harder to scale) but also to aid employers identify the right talent. It’s not clear what that would look like but possibly you leverage P2P in the same way — much in the way that guilds of old tested and accredited members — so the public knew that the goldsmith or merchant was trustworthy.

As Joi Ito pointed out in ‘The Next Great Digital Extinction’ the coming wave of digitisation won’t just create digital copies, it will create new products, services and institutions. We can be confident in these not because they sound compelling but because they are already here — just less so in the West. the most likely areas are China — given the volume and size of Edtech investment and India — where educational institutions are insufficient in quality and quantity for demand. Seen from this lens, It is not that disruption has passed Higher Education, it’s simply that the first wave wasn’t that disruptive.