Disruptive Class: a book review

Mercy Mathew
Asian School of Business
23-Sept-2009

A book review ‘Disrupting Class’ is written by Clayton M Christensen, the author of ‘Innovators Dilemma’. The session started with a discussion on ‘what is innovation’ and ‘what makes innovation disruptive’. Disruptive Innovation set new growth trajectory for the company. But convincing the existing customers to use a new technology is difficult, so finding new users for the innovation or targeting non-consumption is the path to acceptance and growth for the innovation.
The concept of disruptive innovation can be applied in the field of education too. Schools are often blamed for not improving their performance; and lack of funding, inappropriate teaching model, among others, are listed as the causes for the same. But at a deeper level, one has to acknowledge that people have different intelligence, their learning style and learning pace also differ. Intelligence is not to be defined in terms of IQ alone but it can be linguistic, logical, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.

A disruptive innovation in the filed of education would be the one which targets the above issue. The objective would be to facilitate student centric learning. For doing that, the content has to be tailored to the intelligence of the students and the pace of their learning. Computer based learning would lead this innovation. But during the initial phase, software would be proprietary and hence expensive. So to make the innovation popular content could be generated by users and shared. Since it disrupts the instructor lead learning, there could be oppositions from instructors. It would also call for revamping the education value chain, as the content, delivery method and evaluation system would require transformation. To bring about this change, it would require a culmination of power, management, leadership and cultural tools.