Personalized learning is having its moment in the spotlight in educational technology. Teachers are consciously trying to help students develop personalized learning networks for learning beyond the classroom (see my effort here). Additionally, tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple are all investing in this sector of education. But they're not working together. As our students spend more and more time on their screens, we need to ensure they're using that time and space for learning. After all, that's what education is all about. What's the best way to do this in education? Whichever tech giant(s) can facilitate learning best online stands to make a pretty penny.
Enter the unbundling of education.
Unbundling is a pretty simple concept: it's the idea that to succeed in business in the 21st century, entrepreneurs are unbundling existing industries and structures to reach more consumers. For example, in the news industry, it's increasingly unlikely that consumers read a newspaper cover to cover--not with the Web, Facebook and Twitter. It's also increasingly unlikely that consumers will listen to an entire CD (who even buys CDs anymore?)--not with Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music. That's because businesses have unbundled these industries and consumers have embraced it. Education is undergoing a similar transformation.
With the web, there are plenty of ways to learn the content needed to excel in school. A student can also "unbundle" education by pursuing his own education online--without blindly following his high school and college mandatory curriculum. Clearly this is happening on the web, but on which tech giant's platform and on whose dime?
Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all trying to reach teachers and students in this quest to unbundle education through personalized online learning. Amazon hopes teachers will sign up for their platform--Amazon Inspire--that helps teachers access and purchase materials to teach. Facebook built an LMS (Learning Management System) for the Summit School District in NJ. Zuckerberg is thoroughly committed to personalized learning, saying the "model just intuitively makes sense.” So, as a philanthropist, he invested in AltSchool which "has a well rounded suite of products" that "facilitates deeply personalized learning."
These companies are assuming that they need to enter the educational technology market in order to get teachers and students to land on their platforms and access their educational materials. But do they really need new structures, platforms, and brands to do this? The platforms already exist and they can and do help students with learning. The problem for these tech companies isn't that they don't have great educational content, it's that they can't entice and keep students in their platforms for learning. I propose two things. First, tech giants should simplify by inviting students and teachers into their existing platforms and promoting education there. Students and teachers are already familiar with and regularly visit these platforms.
Second, the tech giants need to work with educators to get students learning on their platforms. For instance Apple has iTunes U--a market for learning a multitude of different subjects through audio (like podcasts) and video. Google's YouTube serves a similar purpose. There are thousands of MOOCs available through EdX, MIT Open Courseware and Udacity (to name a few). And Facebook and Twitter are building up impressive lists of professional organizations that publish educational content on their servers everyday. But students don't use these resources for learning. Tech companies need to harness educators' understanding of how to get students to navigate to and engage with these specialized products the way they currently use Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
The current approach to #edtech has tech giants meeting education in the middle instead of truly disrupting it (i.e. unbundling through personalized learning). Educators and tech companies need to keep the dialogue moving. It's going to take innovators who can bridge the gap between the tech giants and education to fully achieve disruption. As Zuckerberg said, “I’m used to building products with Facebook that hundreds of millions of people use. For this, you need to know the specific communities and you need to know the teachers and the students.” As an educator, I'm on the ground working to unbundle education through personalized learning networks.
That's why I built this website for my students: socialmediamarketplace.org.
References:
Amazon Unveils Online Education Service for Teachers (NYTimes)
Facebook Helps Develop Software That Puts Students in Charge of Their Lesson Plans (NYTimes)
