So five years in Thomas Friedman notices what is going on.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.
I generally think Friedman is a dope but here he is right, if about 5 years behind. I come from a family of academics, but I am a black sheep who went into business. Yet by staying studiously outside the credit system I work when I want, for how much I want, and have absolute academic freedom, not in any way curtailed, which no University professor can claim. (There are always things even a tenured professor cannot say, even though true.) I have all of the teaching I can stand, plus a couple of books selling on amazon and a articles cited dozens of times daily.
Course flipping is Socratic dialogue on steroids: watch the lectures as homework, do the homework in class... this is the future.
But I see something I don't think anyone else has noticed. When there are 40,000 people taking the course, yes there is no access to the sage on the stage, but among the 40,000 there must be 4000 natural teachers. What is missing is a way for those natural teachers to assume a means of leading a dozen or so others through the material.
Another WAOE gig? Some means of identifying the natural teachers in a class and giving them a platform? Pose this to the Panasonic group looking for something to fund?
John Spiers, MA
Black Sheep Enterprises
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