Unbundling the educational package

I just got back from the World Economic Forum’s summer meeting in Tianjin, China and there was much talk of disruption and innovation there. Basically, if you weren’t disrupting, you were furniture. Perhaps not surprisingly, one topic area that was universally considered ripe for disruption was Education.

There are many ideas bandied about with respect to “disrupting” education and some are interesting to consider. MOOCs were the darlings of…last year…but they’re old news now. Sam Lessin has a nice piece in the The Information (total paywall, sorry, but it’s worth it) about building a subscription model for universities. Aswath Damodaran has what I think is a nice framework for thinking about the “education business”.

One thing that I latched on to in Damodaran’s piece is the idea of education as a “bundled product”. Indeed, I think the key aspect of traditional on-site university education is the simultaneous offering of

1. Subject matter content (i.e. course material)
2. Mentoring and guidance by faculty
3. Social and professional networking
4. Other activities (sports, arts ensembles, etc.)

MOOCs have attacked #1 for many subjects, typically large introductory courses. Endeavors like the Minerva project are attempting to provide lower-cost seminar-style courses (i.e. anti-MOOCs).

I think the extent to which universities will truly be disrupted will hinge on how well we can unbundle the four (or maybe more?) elements described above and provide them separately but at roughly the same level of quality. Is it possible? I don’t know.