New business models of education

(my daughter replaced a missing rail by cutting her bathrobe’s belt)

I was thinking about my job as a professor in a business university and I asked myself what is its business model. 

A University (and most educational institutions) are Marketplaces, i.e. organizations that provide best matches between offer and demand. In the specific case of universities, the demand is that of students seeking for high quality knowledge and skills and the offer is that of professors who are supposed to transfer that knowledge and skills to students.

Hence, university are intermediation companies. We all know that the Internet has contributed to the removal of several intermediation steps in the value chains of some industries such as travel agencies, music retail stores, video rentals, bookstores, just to mention a few. However, Internet enabled different forms of intermediation through e-commerce (e.g. Amazon, eBay, iTunes).

Will it be the case also for education sector? Are universities destined to disappear? Will Internet radically transform the education sector? And how?

The process is already happening somehow. Some of them that are capable of reinventing themselves are becoming the platform for distance learning such as Stanford with its online programs. There are new educational companies pushing to the extreme the concept of online learning such as Udemy, Khan Academy, Insegnalo. Some others are using Internet to promote their on-ground education just by distributing video recordings of on-ground courses online, for instance on iTunes U, Coursera and Udacity.

But most universities in the world are lagging behind the digital revolution of education. This will lead to a natural selection process where those institution who fails in adapting to the new media and technologies will simply disappear.

However, universities are not just marketplaces. They can indeed provide a local social and cultural role. Learning is not just about knowing something. It is also about doing something well. Learning is an experience which can be provided both online and on-ground, but the challenge is how to make these to types of experience complementary and not one just the mimic of the other.

The point is: what the student are supposed to do in classes. Do they have just to listen the professor or should they perform some other types of activity?

Flip Teaching from jjoslin on Vimeo.

One (partial) answer to the above question comes from the “flip teaching” model. In this model, the roles of homework and lectures are reversed. Students attend the lectures at home streaming videos from the Internet (and therefore when they are ready and at their own pace since they can start, pause, replay the video whenever they want). In class, they meet with students and mentors to do practical work and discuss. 

I believe that universities have a fundamental rôle in society namely that of  creating leaders. But leadership is not about knowledge and skills, it is about Mindset. Some say that leadership cannot be learned as it is innate and therefore cannot be taught. You might agree on that or not. The point is that there might be many potential leaders who cannot become established just because they are turned down by “managerial” educational settings.

One thing among others that distinguishes leaders from non-leaders is that they are able to set (ambitious) goals and get things done. They are both open-minded and “action” people.

In contrast, standard education does not push people to action unless it is restricted to the “predictable” (read “assessable”) domains. They discourage creative thinking and challenging the “status-quo”. In order to be a good student, one has to learn the standard way of doing things. It might be reasonable as a first step, but not in the long run especially for those institutions that are expected to train leaders (e.g. as business and engineering schools).

What has this to do with Lean Startup?

I noticed that the main obstacle in starting businesses in a lean way is mostly about mindset. People are always fearful of failure and struggle to see it as a mean for learning. They are paralyzed and their ideas tend to remain on paper (aka Business Plans).

Failed attempts are just seen as bad, while they should be considered valuable because of the learning feedback. Especially where there is a lot of uncertainty, eliminating it through experiments is extremely valuable. Learning that something works is as valuable as learning that something does not work.

But unfortunately, people are conditioned by an educational system where failure is ALWAYS stigmatized. If a student completely fails gets an F which is much worse than a C- where a student passes with low performance. Maybe, next time the student who got an F has learned and will outperform everybody else. But the damage is done. He is already stigmatized as a “looser”.

That is the problem: in learning there are no Losers or Winners. In learning everybody win as long as they try something. It is the commitment that should be assessed. The eagerness of learning seems to be a more appropriate metric for learning in education.

But this is hard to change. Professors are at best lazy and not willing to challenge the standard schema of top-down (ex-cathedra) teaching. Showing powerpoint slides and assigning homework is much easier that create a stimulating learning environment which fosters creativity and divergent thinking.

I understand that changing established learning models is not easy, but academic institutions should adopt a new strategy by investing in (young?) teachers armed with new tools and willing to experiment with them in classes without fear of failure. Of course, there are risks in doing that, but I believe it is the only way to move forward higher education towards new models of learning in order to let students the right mindset to become the new leaders and achieve a positive impact in our society.