When a paradigm shift is in play, it is typically the ‘new entrant’ entrepreneurs that are most likely to see and exploit the opportunities that are inevitably created. This is because the custodians of the old paradigm believe they have too much to lose and will use their energies to erroneously try to 'command the tides' as the Viking King Canute vainly attempted in times past.
Seasoned entrepreneurs like myself have also become less interested in pushing new inventions on unsuspecting target markets and are more likely to take Ralph Waldo Emerson advice and “Hitch your wagon to a star”. For every person on the planet with intellectual capital (know-how, unique experience, specialist expertise, uncommon knowledge) online learning is that star. When sufficient momentum is established, online learning will create a vast amount of new commercial opportunities for individuals currently excluded by the old educational paradigm.
Open-online learning is the idea whose time has come, not because I or others declare it so or because we believe it can be marketed as such, but because the global community is embracing it at such breakneck speed that they will eventually declare it by overwhelming affirmation and application – The New Paradigm.
Anyone who has studied entrepreneurship or economics will be familiar with the work of the 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter who identified that some innovations bring about a form of "creative destruction" in the world in which they are introduced. Schumpeter used this term, borrowed from Marx, to describe a process in which the old ways of doing things are destroyed by the previous beneficiaries who choose enthusiastically to replace it with a better way. The traditional way is discarded not as a close competitive loser but because it becomes irrelevant.
It is my belief that the emerging Open Online Learning is a new Paradigm that will ultimately ‘creatively destroy' much of the current traditional educational Paradigms. Many educational institution are making valliant efforts to accomodate the new Open Online Learning paradigm, but it just doesn’t fit comfortably into the old mould for reasons that I have outlined above and below, together with their fixation on qualifications over competency, their top down rather than bottom up learning resource creation and their continuance with a failed commercial model (offering uncompetitively priced products to a diminishing market - Think IBM).
The single greatest barrier inhibiting the old paradigm from embracing the new is the price of learning. The new open – online learning can be produced for a fraction of the cost, maintained 'on the shelf' for a cost approaching zero and has an inherent scalability that delivers a commercially sustainable enterprise at a fraction of the sell price currently offered by the old paradigm.
Think about the price drop in software from custom-built to the online genetic download and you get a picture of the price change that is about to hit custom-built educational product. The genetic version of the $50,000 custom built program of the past can be downloaded today for less than $500 in the same way that the $5,000 knowledge transfer required for a degree under the current paradigm will soon sell for $50. The new price is more than enough to support a virtual educational enterprise selling data products to a global market but it will 'creatively destroy' the financial viability of the old paradigm with its overheads of extensive infrastructure maintenance, administration and compliance costs and academic payroll not to mention the complete income annihilation of the current 'on-campus' product if they adopt the new.
To a large extent these two Paradigms are incommensurable because they each live in different worlds and imbibe different and possibility irreconcilable mindsets. Recent entrepreneurial history is peppered with examples of industry leaders (like the traditional educational institutions) who were hidebound and fixated on traditional ideas yet watched helplessly as their markets were destroyed for failing to identify, embrace or change to the new Paradigm.
These institutions are further inhibited by their dependance on government hand-outs rather than market forces, to underpin their financial viability. So a few hundred ‘purse string holding’ government policy makers, largely detached from market realities are setting agendas heavily politicised and appear to control the educational institutions like puppets on a string and may well be leading them like the mythical Pied Piper of old.
Educational systems today must develop, if they can, new capabilities to effectively respond in the face of this continual and fast-paced change. An educational system thrives only while it mirrors the community that it serves. Traditional educational products only lead while they satisfy new consumer demands better than other available options. The educational process only serves while it delivers new and improved performance outcomes as demanded by the learners.
If the current educational system does not fulfil these criteria then the global community of learners will declare the traditional educational paradigm as irrelevant as they embrace with enthusiasm the new Open Online Learning one. It is not the messengers but rather the technological, commercial and social agents of change that are driving the new paradigm shift in education. The signs are everywhere to be seen. In fact, the shift is already well underway with a global move from a mechanistic, manufacturing, industrial based society to a more organic, service based and information centred one.
If educational institutions ignore these agents for change then the gap in the market that they create by their inactivity will be filled by ever willing and ever ready entrepreneurs, with the help of passionate teachers and knowledgeable industry experts, keen to exploit possibility one of the greatest global opportunities ever presented to individuals or entrepreneurial firms.
The single largest untapped gold mine in the world is the human intellectual capital buried deep in the minds of individuals with know-how, specific expertise, broad based inter-disciplined education, unique experience, intuition, original thoughts and uncommon knowledge. In the past, only the immediate geographic zone or employer organization could benefit from this value and to a large extent was lost with the passing of that person’s life.
Furthermore, there was no easy medium for the person possessing human intellectual capital to turn it into both learning for the planet and intellectual property (tangible products) that they own for themselves. This is because their lack of academic station may have excluded them from contributing to learning in the old paradigm or the previous publishing paths were block by either the nessessary endorsements of the academic elite or were thwarted by the commercial constraints of book based publishing.
The internet, together with projects like Blooger, eBooks and courseware programs like Myicourse.com & cnx.com, have to a large extent eliminated these barriers. The one final barrier is the process needed to turn intellectual capital into learning resources and materials that others can easily understand and apply. Enter the teacherpreneur. This is a core competency of teaching and one that the new paradigm will call on with great urgency as it gains momentum, thereby ensuring significant income streams for teachers.
"Apples had been falling out of trees long before Newton came along. It’s just that no one before had thought about it quite like he did" PB
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