Watch! Disruption ahead.

Watch! Disruption ahead

Recently a few well known book publishers and distributors, who also run a couple of retail bookstores, complained about the "unfair" trade practices followed by the online book sellers, which has affected their sales of books. In fact they fear that they may be soon out of the market if online sale is not regulated or controlled.

Well, when was the last time you visited a post office to buy stamps or postcard? Several years, is perhaps the answer! Well where are those "red boxes" that used to be there on the main roads on a cement pedestal, or in some cases fixed to a tree, or hung from the wall of a building? You don't find them now. The emails, and couriers have eroded the bottom line of the mammoth postal system in India and  at other places too. So, can there be demand to ban these emails and couriers?

Disruptive technology or disruptive innovation as they are called, happen to destabilize an existing system, whether one likes or accepts or remains neutral. Cellphones replaced the big handsets, wireless appliances killed the wired systems, "soft" copies replaced the "hard" copies. We are all seeing these changes.

Kids in US schools carry e-slates to their classrooms. The teacher uses the touch screen and no chalk and duster. Yes, education is no exception. The disruptive technology is right at the door everywhere. Long ago books like Diffusion of Innovation by Everett Rogers (1962) and Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970) predicted the type of changes and their impact on the society. Grudgingly or willingly one has to accept the changes.

Now onto the big debate on MOOC (Massive Online Open Course). As stated in the wikipedia, a massive open online course (MOOC; /muːk/) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums.

A recent long discussion in the LinkedIn debated on the online courses posing a serious threat to the "brick and mortar" universities. One professor claimed that the college enrollment in the US has dropped by 25%. An alarming sign indeed. Remember the fear expressed when "correspondence courses" started coming in a big way and distance education became a norm and not an exception.

So, do the existing conventional systems of teaching go for a "moocsive" sorry, massive change? Watch an interesting discussion by two Wharton Professors - "Disruption Ahead: What MOOCs Will Mean for MBA Programs", http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/moocs-mba-programs-opportunities-threats/

Let me conclude by saying "change, change, everywhere; not a way to stop". (Yes, I just changed "water, water, everywhere; nor a drop to drink" from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

"Change is the only constant in life" - Who said and when?  

Heraclitus of Ephesus, (Herakleitos; c. 535 BC – 475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, known for his doctrine of change) (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus)