Sunday, June 01, 2014

The future of education is not online



An article in the NYT yesterday with the provocative title "Business Disrupted" outlined the dilemma faced by HBS where star profs like Porter and Christensen have sharply different views on the potential role of online education.

Well, who cares about those guys say, what does Keith Head think? Thanks for asking.

If our “business” is something like selling books or records, or DVD rentals, then the internet might  reasonably be seen as an existential threat. Ask Blockbusters or Borders (or Duthie books here in Vancouver) or any number of record (CD) store chains that don’t exist anymore.

But if our business is more like a yoga class or a music concert even selling lingerie (Victoria’s Secret has had a mail order catalog since 1978 and e-commerce since 1995 but  they still found it worthwhile to take over the huge retail space Virgin had occupied on Robson) then it seems we have less to fear.   In the case of yoga and live music, a core aspect of the business is the shared experience. Those attending get something from the instructor, sure, but they also get energy and other emotional connections from the rest of the audience. My Pilates instructor puts his classes on Youtube but I watched for about a minute before losing interest. And people have long had yoga DVDs but I have a feeling most of them are rarely used after purchase. Music concerts continue to charge hefty prices even though we can find many performances online.

If this analogy is correct, then only a certain type of business education is seriously threatened by the internet: non-interactive, 100+ seat lectures.  We need to be moving not in the direction of "recorded music" (lecture clips videoed and put online) but in the direction of live music, emphasizing a shared experience where you have to physically be there to get it.

One corollary is that just as cellphones need to be off in yoga class or violin concertos, laptops need to be closed in the classroom (related note recent research finds taking notes longhand enhances memory). As someone put it recently in a teaching panel, open laptops "suck the energy out of the classroom."