Education is facing a period of significant change and disruption. It can be very useful in times of change to examine analogous situations, and use knowledge of how they played out, to understand better what might happen in the future.
A close analogy to the world of education is the world of music. However, it is not the rise of MP3 and iPods that provides the best starting point for comparison - we have to go all the way back to the early days of recorded music.
Prior to the invention of the phonograph, to hear music you had to either play it yourself, socialise with musical friends and acquaintances, or listen to professional musicians at a concert. This situation had remained essentially unchanged for hundreds of years, other than a gradual evolution of styles and tools employed.
The bulk of education today is similarly delivered in real time to small audiences. There is endless scope for debate over the proportion of education that is delivered by professionals versus 'amateurs' (think homework and workplace learning), or the relative advantages of some styles and tools, but nothing has fundamentally changed for hundreds of years in the way most people have given and received 'education'.
After the invention of the phonograph, recording, manufacturing, and playback technology all evolved rapidly to the point of delivering an overall experience that was 'good enough' to become attractive, and the number of producers and consumers rose. At this point, it did not noticeably replace the traditional approach, but mostly served niches that were not addressed otherwise. That stage could be reasonably equated to where education was a couple of years ago: the Open University movement, Australian School of the Air and early work on online internet education being pioneers of new technologies and approaches that addressed relatively niche markets.
Then radio revolutionised distribution, offering a much larger audiences at much lower cost. Composers and musicians began to adjust the material to fit the dominant medium. Competition between radio and records drove improvements in the technology and quality of both, and costs fell. Before long, a tipping point was reached, and in a short time the new approach became totally dominant, shaping the general perception of how music is normally experienced, and driving the direction, structure and style of the whole field.
Education stands at its equivalent tipping point now. There is no stopping it. The only real uncertainty is how fast things will change. Although there is tremendous inertia built into the system, things will probably change much faster than most people expect. The music analogy is most valuable because of the similarities in the economics of the two industries before transition. Looking at the evolution of the music business offers valuable insights into the future of education.
The key characteristic was that prior to the phonograph, music was subject to severe limits of productivity and scalability. In general, a maximum of a few hundred people could realistically hear a performance. Most crucially, the performance involved simultaneous production and consumption of the 'product' in real time. Almost all education today has the same production and delivery characteristics, and is incredibly labour intensive.
There is a lot of debate about whether a MOOC is - or could ever be - as good as attending a course with a live teacher in class. What we should realise from the music analogy is that such debates entirely miss the point. Nobody would argue that records and radios even in the mid 60s were as full and enriching an experience as hearing a live concert, and yet by that time the transformation of the world's assumptions about the provision of music was almost complete. Recently, digital music has brought a second wave of disruption to the 'established' industry which was the original disruptor.
The advent of MOOCs, Khan Academy and others have demonstrated that a teaching methodology and technology which is as scalable as radio and records is 'good enough' to deliver some real perceived value, with almost negligible costs per recipient. A 'good enough' product that is orders of magnitude cheaper to produce and consume than a comparable 'excellent' product has an overwhelming competitive advantage. It will inevitably become the dominant force driving the whole field, and that will enable and drive rapid improvement. Much lower costs will expand the market massively, involving many more people as regular consumers, and increasing the frequency of use.
The high-end product of live teaching will not be totally destroyed. As a proportion of the overall industry, it will decline dramatically due to a reduction in the perceived advantages that must justify the extra cost, though how much it declines in absolute terms is not yet clear. People still go to live concerts. But who and what they listen to has been strongly influenced by the new approach, and the organisation, key players, and business models of the whole industry have changed radically over the course of the last century.
Since this is about online education, I'm closing with an exercise for the reader. Play this variation of a popular puzzle genre. Work out the correspondences between roles in the music industry and those in education below. Expand the lists if you feel the need. Are there any definitively 'correct' answers? Are there roles for which there is not and will not be a correspondence? Reflect on what your choices suggest about the future. Please post your thoughts.
| World of Music | World of Education | |
|---|---|---|
| Advertisers | Commercial educational organisation (eg language schools, training) | |
| Composer / songwriter | Commercial platform and course hub (eg Coursera, Udacity) | |
| Disco / nightclub | Educational publisher (eg Pearson) | |
| iTunes store and equivalents | Government education agency / regulators | |
| Large scale venues | High schooler | |
| Manager (of artist or band) | High traffic / portal property (eg Google, Facebook, linkedIn) | |
| Music sharing sites & systems | Homeschooling parent | |
| Producer | Instructional designer | |
| Promoters and ticket agencies | Non-profit platform/course hubs (eg Khan Academy, EdX) | |
| Radio station, music TV | Pedagogical researcher | |
| Record label | Personal tutor / coach | |
| Record / CD manufacturer | Platform / technology provider (eg Blackboard, Instructure) | |
| Session musician / backing singer | Postgraduate | |
| Singer / band member / headline musician | Primary schooler | |
| Small scale live music clubs / pubs | Professor, teacher | |
| Studio technician | School (K-12) | |
| Talent Scout | Teaching assistant | |
| Music consumers (make your own categories) | University | |
| High traffic / portal property (eg Google, Facebook) | Working population / adult | |
| Amateur musician | Retiree | |
| Music teacher (for playing an instrument) | Advertiser |
