Speculation

People like to talk about which industry EdTech in general and MOOCs in particular most resemble.

A recent analogy specific to MOOCs has to do with the textbook industry which, like online learning, was initially greeted as a threat to the professorate.  After all, if the expertise of the greatest teachers in a field were all collected into a single curated volume, then what was left for the remaining teachers to do other than tell students to read those books?

The growth of a multi-billion dollar textbook industry alongside an even huger college industry demonstrated that more and better material only led to more and better teaching.  But another industry – computers – potentially provides a better analogy to free learning.

After all, the history of computing has been a history of disruption when market leaders chartering ocean liners for their annual events one year became fire sale properties the next.  And this disruption has followed a certain pattern whereby a new innovation (such as microcomputers) are not sold to traditional computer buyers (like large companies looking for bigger and more powerful machines) but instead move into new markets (like home and small-business users) where they eventually evolve to conquer the industry.

This pattern of disruption was applied to education in Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn’s Disrupting Class which talks about how new modes of instruction (including online learning), while meeting resistance in traditional institutions, can find new niches to grow from (by providing AP classes in subjects a brick-and-mortar school is not staffed to teach, for instance).  And if you think about the educational niches MOOCs are filling (homeschoolers or lifelong learners, for example), you can see a similar pattern of a non-traditional market giving a new innovation the support it needs to reach critical mass.

While I’m fond of the disruptive technology metaphor for EdTech, the recent surge in investment in this field also points to another category of industries we might turn to for analogies: speculative markets such as telcom.

Now there have been speculative markets for centuries (such as the 17th century tulip craze), or even millennia (if you want to consider the debts run up by Roman Senators to buy land in newly conquered territories as a form of speculation).  But the industry I have in mind when I think about EdTech is the telecommunications craze that soaked up billions in investment in the 1990s.

During that period, analysts repeatedly pointed out that there were too many companies and too many technologies competing to lay down the lines that would bring serious bandwidth to every home, every school and every business.  And, indeed, many of the players who entered this field with hundreds of millions of dollars of investor backing no longer exist.

But when companies like Nortel went out of business, their departure did not lead to their high-speed cable being ripped from the ground or their satellites shot out of the sky.  Rather, those assets were consolidated under a few bigger more stable market leaders (who could buy them at bargain prices).  And the end result is that the original dream of the telcom industry (high-speed connectivity for all) is now taken for granted (at least by those of us now owning computers that no longer include a telephone jack).

If you think about all the money pouring into EdTech startups, especially those who are collecting subscribers by giving away free stuff with no clear pathway to revenue (much less profitability), you see a similar pattern emerging.  For like a kid digging through a pile of manure certain that a pony can be found at the bottom, investors are flocking to education as the “next big thing” in hope that Cisco President John Chambers was right when he claimed that “online education will make email look like a rounding error.”

The thing is, Chambers was probably correct that elearning will eventually revolutionize education (even if its returns might make it a big vs. a mega industry).  But while we are in the current speculative phase, money is pouring in to support the first round of innovators, and institutions are scrambling to join up with things like MOOC consortia in fear of being left behind.

And even if these first players are not the ones who end up dominating the industry, the courses being created are not going to be erased from every server in the land if one or more players can’t figure out a business model to sustain themselves.  Rather, like the high-speed wireless we all take for granted, they will become assets in an educational infrastructure yet to be defined but certain to change the way we learn (with who constitutes that “we” also being up for grabs).