Which disruptive technologies are on your radar?

The biggest disruptions facing us are not digital, though they are enabled and catalyzed by electronic tools and technical standards. Perhaps the biggest two disruptive technologies on the horizon are changes to fixed-length teacher-led courses, and the disaggregation of learning and assessment. Courses and assessment are so deeply embedded that we seldom even see them as technologies, but they are at least as much so as whiteboards and computers. The change to courses is in part catalyzed by the ‘failure’ of MOOCs, the completion rates of which provide compelling evidence that, in the absence of coercion, the traditional fixed-length fixed-outcome course makes very little sense. The course – one of our most cherished technologies – is, and has only ever been, a compromise driven by the laws of physics and convenience of administration. Pedagogically, it is an incredibly bad way to support learning, notwithstanding occasional saving graces like communities by default. Online learning is changing that. We have already seen a large drop in average MOOC size, as well as a large growth in smaller-chunk learning, from Wikipedia to the Kahn academy, as well as smaller chunk qualifications like nanodegrees etc, and this is set to massively disrupt our traditional educational forms as we take those lessons on board. A move from a model of teacher-control to one of learner control is perhaps the most important thing digital technologies provide and is their most disruptive consequence, which happens whether we want it or not. Once we have got rid of the problem of the always illusory teacher-control paradigm, assessment follows. If learners are explicitly following unique individual paths, we can no longer think in terms of sets of uniform learning outcomes when dealing with accreditation.

There will be a move to more use of badges to signal fine-grained competence, social endorsements of learning, and aggregate portfolios that pull together disparate learning, along with devaluation of traditional credentials. Hopefully, this should herald a move away from summatively assessing and, especially, grading learning as an umbilically linked part of the learning process. Perhaps the biggest problem with the traditional educational model is that certificates, grades, and accreditation have become the purpose rather than the sign of learning. Binding assessment to learning creates untenable power relationships and, worst of all, makes motivation extrinsic to learning. Extrinsic motivation always crowds out intrinsic motivation, sometimes completely. So, traditional education is fundamentally concerned with overcoming problems of its own making: it demotivates by design, so much of it is concerned with trying, often unsuccessfully, to restore what it has taken away. Books once disrupted that model though eventually came to reinforce it because they provided replicable uniformity. Online learning blows it out of the water. It is taking a while for formal education to catch up with that reality, but we can and we must.