How MOOCs are regrouping the educational industry
What has knowledge become today? Is it still a social equity that can only be earned by blending face-to-face studies and networking? Or has it turned into a commodity for sale in numerous online teaching outlets? Nearly all education providers have engaged in rethinking themselves for the brave new world of MOOCs. And there is already a varieity of opinions. Marginal optimists proclaim the true teaching shall withstand the Internet. The opposite end of the educators’ guild diversifies into adjacent activities. The center seems to prepare for a gradual and inevitable disruption of the teaching tradition, the slow disaster in which only the fittest will survive.
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| Karl Briullov. The Last Day of Pompeii |
In my life I like standing in the middle, but this is not the case. My vision of the change is quite, although not totally, apocalyptic: I believe in a five years, maybe a decade, we will see many schools having exited the business and few profiting from the industry transformation. I also believe there is already a pattern displaying what is going to happen to every one of them. And it’s up to us whether or not we discover that pattern and take advantage of our discovery.
Let’s look at the world as a market for the educational industry. Education exists to be applied, and out there is employers' demand for every discipline or, more precisely, for the people who know how to use what they have learned from that discipline. At the same time technology makes workplaces more and more efficient. The efficiency mindset motivates employers to look for ways of reducing costs and turning fixed into variable. They have a perfect reason for considering technology as a means to replace a conventional face-to-face work by a cost efficient distance (or tele-) work. If workplaces evolve towards a greater efficiency, then whatever can be teleworked will be teleworked at future organizations.
How does the mode of application of knowledge relate to the way that knowledge is provided? In other words, why educators must fear the teleworkization of their disciplines when those are applied at workplaces as professions?
The answer is because telework means little or no social activity of employees at organizations. So the social component of profession, which educators traditionally deliver in face-to-face teaching, is no more demanded by employers. Social skills devalue because they are regarded as over qualification and a cost driver. Knowledge applied in telework professions transforms in a commodity, which no longer needs to come from social relations in a classroom. It results from transactions instead. That is the moment of truth for discipline providers: once the knowledge they teach becomes a commodity, the teaching itself will have to be teleworked, too. And that means everything changes for them: statuses, roles, jobs and lives.
What education providers can do to defend themselves? Their chances to preserve the teaching tradition or to profit from the MOOC technology are directly linked to the maturity of their disciplines. Nascent, debatable disciplines easily give way to interpretations by their instructors. On the contrary, well grounded in theory, commonly accepted subjects allow no alterations of their contents. Young topics let educators differentiate by modifying or even creating the knowledge that will be strongly associated with their brands or personalities. Mature disciplines won't permit anyone to copyright the knowledge they contain, so MOOCs will eventually turn their providers into an undifferentiated academic workforce. In other words, if an educator’s portfolio is a nascent material, he will have all chances to attach it to himself and sell the package to the market as a unique product. The mode of delivery – classroom or distance – will depend on whether his discipline is teleworked at workplaces or not, but in any case he profits from a differentiation markup. Alternatively, if an educator teaches a mature subject, the MOOC technology will probably ruin his world.
To understand the pattern of the change MOOCs are bringing to the educational industry, we may consider the telework potential of disciplines and the interpretational power of educators two dimensions that form a continuum. In my previous article I introduced it as The teaching tradition vulnerability map and suggested ranking scales for positioning discipline portfolios on it. The map looks like this:
Karma 1. Continuity of the teaching tradition. Sciences of man
As the telework potential of disciplines in this quadrant of the map is low, knowledge is considered a social equity that one can effectively apply at a workplace only if the professional core is accompanied by human virtues like ability to work in a team, leadership, emotional intellect, etc. This is the area where networking isn’t just a buzzword, but a real tool to get a job. The knowledge here is created in personal relations between teachers, students and stakeholders involved in creating, disseminating and applying it.
The interpretational power of a discipline provider in this K1 area is high, which means the knowledge delivered to students is strongly associated with a provider’s personality or institutional brand. That feature opens the doors to differentiating educational products. Have you noticed that over last 15 years management educators have invented hundreds of new disciplines in, between and around human resources management, marketing, strategy, but the count is far less in finance and economics? This is because finance and economics lie on the lower half of the interpretational power axis, so they are pretty hard to differentiate. And that is the opposite for, say, strategic management, whose position is on the upper half. Differentiating the discipline of strategy is nice and easy, so personalities and schools flood the market. In K1 provider is the only measure of his discipline, so the Sciences of man appears to be an appropriate name for this area.
Karma 1, on one hand, allows educators to remain within the face-to-face teaching tradition, which is good news for those who reject the world of MOOCs. On the other hand, this karma warns those who rush in the online teaching: they are going nowhere because there will be neither telework demand for what they teach nor the technology for online creating knowledge as a social equity. Those who embrace this karma will have to live by the following three rules:
1. Knowledge is a social equity that results from relations.
2. Business models should be built around portfolios of paid offline courses.
3. Successful providers will capitalize on relations with individual and corporate clients.
2. Business models should be built around portfolios of paid offline courses.
3. Successful providers will capitalize on relations with individual and corporate clients.
Karma 2. Partial disruption of the teaching tradition. Defensive elitism
The telework potential for applying a discipline’s knowledge at professional workplaces is high for this right upper quadrant – the K2 area. I explained above that the delivery of such a commodity-type knowledge will have to be teleworked, and technically that means destruction of the old school teaching tradition for educators who populate this area.
However, educational providers with a strong interpretational power and differentiated portfolios may build an efficient defense against the MOOCs by encircling elite groups in target markets and offering them a combination of free online top quality introductory courses and paid offline core education. They will reserve the best, heartland part of their material for the classroom teaching, and they will do that by right of their pedigrees and world-class brands. The second and third echelons of educators in the K2 area will catch up and successfully replicate that strategy in own niches. To balance commoditization of knowledge, educators will foster its exclusivity. Whereas the feature of exclusivity cannot be compelling for the whole market, they will address upscale segments where the knowledge they provide may be positioned as a privilege. That intellectual marketing won’t stop the knowledge’s being a transactional commodity, but it will gradually establish elite groups for whom participating in a face-to-face studying a teleworkable discipline will represent a social ritual, a kind of educational freemasonry or voodoo, whatever metaphor you prefer. I describe such a strategy of preserving the teaching tradition with the term defensive elitism, which, I believe, properly explains the key feature of Karma 2.
The three golden rules for educational providers grouped in the K2 area of the disruption map are the following:
1. Knowledge is a privilege that results from transactions.
2. Business models should stand on a mix of free and paid online and offline courses.
3. Successful providers will capitalize on personal and institutional brands and reputations.
Karma 3. Partial disruption of the teaching tradition. Defensive corporatism
The telework potential of a discipline as profession is insignificant of non-existent in this left lower quadrant. Just like in the K1 corner of the map, that means the practice in organizations will require from discipline alumni sufficient social skills to meet challenges of their jobs. Therefore, the discipline instruction process, following the relational character of knowledge transfer in the K3 area, will not have a tendency to teleworkization and will remain in classrooms.
However, the social skills that students gain in this face-to-face teaching will differ from those received in the class where the Sciences of man are taught (K1). What they will get here will be less generalizable and more organization-centered, as the social component of disciplines will be compulsory adjusted to individual corporate cultures.
This is explained by a low interpretational power of providers of those disciplines and their growing concern about the advance of disruptive MOOCs. Educators of the K3 area have no room for differentiating the material by adding emotional intangibles like personalities or brands. In such circumstances the need to differentiate leads them to enriching disciplines with industrial specifics and, even more focused, with particularities of organizations that purchase education for their talent management programs. Corporate clients will rationally pay educators for the knowledge that is customized in its social aspects to the extent where it becomes barely applicable beyond the industry or, ideally, beyond their organizational charts. Such a strategy, which educators will have to employ to remain in the teaching tradition, may be named defensive corporatism. And this explains how knowledge of the K3 area turns into an organizational equity of limited proprietary use. Networking preserves certain social value, but shrinks to the boundaries of industrial application of professional knowledge.
Karma 3 for educators means staying within the teaching tradition. That is good for die-hard classroom workers or for instructors and institutions with resources that are insufficient for going online. And that is bad for those who, while residing in the K3, have already embraced and invested into MOOCs. The chance is they have hung a bad debt on their balance, and they will have to reconcile and return to the traditional teaching. One landmark element in educators’ strategy within this karma is the concentration on relations with corporate clients rather than establishing and maintaining links with individuals in the open market. The three rules for education providers to abide by in the K3 quadrant are:
1. Knowledge is an organizational equity that results from relations.
2. Business models should exploit a mix of free and paid online and offline courses.
3. Successful providers will capitalize relations with corporate clients.
Karma 4. Total disruption of the teaching tradition. Transactional education
The combination of a high telework potential and a low interpretational power of educational providers as characteristics of disciplines makes the right lower quadrant of the map a natural target for MOOCs. As I explained above, knowledge that is brought into professional application through such disciplines should come to telework-minded employers free from its traditional social component. Otherwise they will regard it as unnecessary costs in the teaching budget. Knowledge becomes a commodity in the K4 area. Educators’ inability to differentiate through personal charisma or institutional brands in the live classroom teaching and their failure to implement the defensive corporatism strategy deepens the problem even more – they lose all economic grounds for maintaining costly face-to-face programs in their portfolios. Their markets will decline, too, ant that will happen with the speed of developing internet infrastructure, online teaching software and advanced knowledge monetization models. So the K4 educators either go fully online to compete with numerous alike and newcomers in providing the transactional education or exit the business.
This karma is intransigent. It offers its residents two options only, and neither of them is about staying unchanged. The three rules of existence in K4 are the following:
1. Knowledge is a commodity that results from transactions.
2. Business models should be based on free online courses.
3. Successful providers will profit from indirect incomes like percentages of context ads on MOOCs hosting their courses.
Karma 5. Technology weds the teaching tradition. Synergy
If the regrouping of the educational industry is viewed from the progress perspective, the lucrative area in the center of the teaching tradition vulnerability map fully justifies the change and disruption. Here, in the K5 spot, the old school instruction of disciplines, which are neither too mature nor too nascent, meets employers’ demand for a moderate teleworkization of the profession. That encounter allows educators to deliver the best of their material by the face-to-face teaching to selected open and corporate markets, where social or organizational aspects of knowledge are valued. At the same time, education providers in the K5 area can reach markets that consider knowledge a commodity. They only need to re-format their disciplines so those could travel smoothly to target market by the MOOC channels.
This karma is friendly to educators with portfolios containing semi-established disciplines that are known well enough to minimize educators’ effort and investment for promoting them and, simultaneously, flexible enough to allow differentiation trough brands and personal charisma. Here are the three synergy rules for K5:
1. Knowledge can be delivered both through relations and through transactions.
2. Business models may either mix free and paid online and offline courses or prioritize any part of the portfolio.
3. Depending on the business model, providers will profit from individual and corporate relations, personal and institutional brands, or indirect incomes granted by the MOOC technology.
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In this article I attempted to explain the change, which is reshaping the educational industry today, with the help of the model called The teaching tradition vulnerability map. It is built on two independent variables that I regard as critically important for understanding the meaning and directions of the change: the telework potential of a discipline and the interpretational power of a discipline provider. The model suggests that the regrouping of the educational industry due to the developing MOOC technology occurs in the continuum formed by those two variables. The model argues that the change is not chaotic, it follows an identifiable pattern. Five key areas are depicted in the model. They correspond with five groups of educational providers emerging across the industry. Members of each group share similar internal and external challenges (live in the same karma), so they may use similar templates for strategies. By looking into particularities of the five key areas one can frame and design such strategies. Therefore, The teaching tradition vulnerability map offers an approach to the strategic management of uncertainty in the turbulent educational industry.
Illustration: Karl Briullov, The Last Day of Pompeii. Drawing. 1828-30. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (source «Искусство. Современная иллюстрированная энциклопедия.» Под ред. проф. Горкина А.П.; М.: Росмэн; 2007.)
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