A good summary of Brad Stone’s new book about Uber and AirBnB, as well as a thoughtfully pragmatic position on the disruption of higher education. I’m not sure the position misses the layer of administration that is most likely to be disrupted. The notion of institution of learning will be rethought, carrying much forward while decentralizing authority and reducing the importance of face-to-face teaching. The value is most likely to increase at the edges, where students and teachers meet in the real world and virtual settings — that’s also where the one-to-one measurement must happen — so loom to organization of the teacher-student interface, where the learning experience is happening, for positive disruption.
One lesson from The Upstarts that we should perhaps learn in higher ed is that the path of industry-wide transformations are seldom predictable. Today, we think we know what developments have a good chance of disrupting our postsecondary status quo (competency based learning definitely, possibly open online education), but transformation might come from unexpected places.
Source: Why Our Higher Ed Transformation Crowd Should Read ‘The Upstarts’ | Technology and Learning