After a somewhat chaotic first month of the Spring Term that included two Revisit Days and a wonderfully energetic Spring Family Weekend, we are now officially in the home stretch of the academic year. Seniors taking part in Senior Project have just two more weeks of classes before departing for their culminating experiential learning project and AP exams begin in less than two weeks. Through all this excitement, the following video rose to the surface in my world during a few quiet moments over the weekend.



I've written about Clayton Christensen and his leading thoughts on disruptive innovation in the market place before, but the above conversation Christensen had at the Startup Grind 2013, an annual venture capital conference, specifically highlights the disruption of the education industry in the near future due to the adoption of massive online coursework now provided by various sources, including leading universities. 



The topic of online classes has been a focus of discussion formally and informally on our own campus over the past few years. For a place like Proctor that seeks to offer 139 academic courses to a population of 360 students, we know that it will become more and more of a conversation as we move into the future and wrestle with the cost of Proctor's educational model. But this is not the focus of this blog post.

Rather, we will focus on the portion of the conversation with Christensen that discusses the type of learners employers will desire in the future. For decades, education has sought to teach individuals the skills they will need to be productive employees in the future, and that process was relatively straight forward. However, in a world that is changing as fast as our's is now, this task is nearly impossible.



Instead, Christensen argues, employers, on mass, must shift the demand for education to a 'learning by doing' model, rather than a chalk-talk model, in order to be job ready. He notes that technology leaders like GE and Intel are already doing this rotating cycles of in-class learning and practical application of skills taught for new employees until mastery within each skill area develops.

Christensen notes, "Students are here [at universities] to learn what we think they should know, but universities do not understand the jobs that employers need. The more we can link employers with the people who online provide the skills, it really will cause the world to flip. Fifteen years from now, half of the world's universities will be bankrupt."



So what does this mean for Proctor? While we are not a university, our goal remains to prepare students for their future, including both academic study and potential employment. In order to reach these goals effectively, we must keep in mind that we are not simply preparing students to learn the skills a given university wants them to learn. Instead, we must continue to thin the walls of our classroom, use real-world expertise of those connected to us, capitalize on our position as a leader in experiential education and allow our curriculum to be as agile as we hope our graduates will be as they move beyond Proctor.