ONLINE EDUCATION: DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION

Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School, in a reprint from the Forum for the Future of Higher Education 2008, suggests that Colleges and Universities, just like the corporate world are undergoing a sort of “disruptive innovation and catalytic change.” (Christensen, 2008). The online environment and the many new technology based tools used alone or in conjunction with that growing environment are fundamentally changing some of the underlying premises of higher education and the thoughts of how student needs in higher education are met.
This paper will discuss the growing acceptability of online higher education and explore the uses and efficacy of some of the new technological tools now available including the use of IM (instant messaging or chat), skype, twitter, flicker, google docs and google earth, facebook, Second Life within the context of some basic principles of learning theory. The paper will analyze the results of a survey of users in a small, private University of new technologies to determine their level of satisfaction, their feelings of efficacy and how they believe they could benefit from new and specific kinds of support apart from that which is traditionally given to instructors in higher education.
The significance of the paper is that as faculty, we are constantly bombarded with “new”, “unique” ways to incorporate technological tools into our teaching and on occasion may be pressured into believing that the tool itself is what is enabling or encouraging learning among our students. This paper will look at the “disruptive innovation and catalytic change” theory and discuss the learning implications of some of the more often suggested tools.