INTRODUCTION

Technology has had a great impact on teaching and learning processes over the last several years. Remembering back only five years, it was rare to have faculty using email or web pages to support their courses. Over this short time we have seen faculty incorporate email, web pages and even entire web course management systems. These innovations started out as "additions" as faculty were cautiously testing the effectiveness of these new modes. Then we saw faculty substitute class time and traditional student work with electronically mediated communication. We saw the incorporation of email assignments, web page directed assignments and even assignments that the students had to do on the web. Each one of these changes was incremental and the faculty and students seemed to realize a positive change in teaching and learning.

Innovations can be classified as sustaining or disruptive (Christensen & Overdorf 2000). A sustaining innovation is an improvement in the technology that will help the mainstream user in a way that supports the current system. Disruptive innovations introduce a new procedure or service that is actually worse for the mainstream users. The incremental changes in teaching and learning described above are examples of sustaining innovations. In each case, the technology enabled the users (faculty) to realize some gain in faculty productivity, student accessibility or student learning. The problem with this path is that these incremental changes may bump into a ceiling and it may take a fundamentally different approach to break through this ceiling.

This paper addresses why we can't rely on sustainable innovations in education and what we will need, as institutions of higher education, to be able to take advantage of the longer term improvements in access, faculty productivity and student learning that can come about through disruptive innovations.

HOW INSTITUTIONS HANDLE DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS

Christensen & Overdorf (2000) describe how institutions can handle and promote necessary changes. An institutions capabilities reside in their resources, processes and values. The resources are the people, equipment and technologies. The processes are the patterns of interaction that use the resources to make products and provide services. Often these processes are set up to be consistent, and thus are designed to resist change. A process may be improved by incrementally change, but often when this process is applied to a new problem it may behave poorly. Businesses can create capabilities to cope with change in two ways. They can create new capabilities internally by setting up strong teams that cross the internal boundaries of the organization or they can spin off small groups to handle particular challenges.

Christensen, Bohmer and Kenagy (2000) describe how disruptive change is crucial for the health care industry. According to these authors, many of the most powerful disruptive innovations worked by providing a product or service to customers that was less expensive, had fewer features than the leading edge users wanted, but served to give other users more control. One good example of a disruptive innovation was the personal computer (much less powerful at the time than the mini-computers available from IBM or DEC).

DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION

Educational institutions are not immune or above the problems associated with the need for innovation, including disruptive innovations. When you read the article by Christensen, Bohmer and Kenagy (2000) just substitute the term "education" for "health care" and the eduspeak term for sustainable innovation is "change".

Disruptive innovations in education could provide services to either students or faculty. For example, the emergence of the University of Phoenix as one of the largest universities in the US is because they offer more flexible format courses that meet some students' needs. UofPHX approach is very similar to the model of nurse practitioners that is being considered in the health care industry. This model for delivering education challenges the rest of the higher education establishment values for campus amenities (such as a physical library), student services for all students (not just a niche group), and that teaching is part of a scholarly continuum of teaching and research. The success of UofPHX has been the envy of many university administrators, and, in true form, "Powerful institutional forces fight simpler alternatives to expensive care because those alternatives threaten their livelihoods." (Christensen, Bohmer and Kenagy 2000).

Two more specific technology and process innovations threaten to be disruptive; teaching with database technology and wireless communications.

Teaching with databases is a entirely new approach to teaching and will require heavy investment of faculty effort with a decrease in the short term productivity of faculty. This approach should enable faculty to move to a more responsive teaching/learning environment that will allow students to use simple diagnostics for self-monitoring. The long term effects could have similar impact on education as the nurse practitioner model could have on health care; simple learning tasks could be monitored and handled by tutors and teaching assistants and more complex learning would be attended to by professors.

Wireless communication (AKA ubiquitous computing) represents a step back in bandwidth for most students on our campuses. The near term cost of sharing bandwidth with other students in the library or cafeteria will necessitate patience and judgment. Faculty who are currently using graphic rich web pages or web course presentation packages will need to reconsider their dependence on graphic icons and mousing around for navigation. There may have to be a return to more command-line type interfaces. In return students and faculty could start using current resources in much different ways and break through the current ceiling of interaction.

HOW PSU COULD SUPPORT DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS

Christensen and Overdorf (2000) suggest several ways to promote disruptive innovation that can be applied to PSU.

Heavyweight team: One method to support disruptive innovation is to create a "heavyweight team" that crosses the current boundaries within the institution. Chrysler did this by focusing on the entire vehicle (minivan, small car, etc.) rather than on the components. Maybe PSU needs to create heavyweight teams that focus on the curriculum rather than the courses. The Title3 project attempted to do something like this when it focused on the General Studies:Social Sciences degree. They enlisted people from different disciplines to coordinate their teaching of the courses that lead to this degree and offered those courses at satellite facilities in Beaverton, Salem and Clackamas County. This was not a "heavyweight team" as described by Christensen and Overdorf because these people were not pulled out of their normal duties but rather a partial reallocation of their effort (around 25%) was devoted to this program. Similar partial reallocation, and even overload strategies, are often used at PSU. I think the overload approach reflects the underlying belief that faculty are capable to do any task and should do everything from advising to teaching to research. This belief may have to be challenged in order to create heavyweight teams that would have enough focus to provide useful innovations.

Spinout Organizations: If the mainstream values of PSU won't support particular types of change, then subgroups might have to be spun off. A good example of this is the School of Extended Studies which offers many small courses and correspondence type courses that aren't considered to be feasible for faculty in most other colleges. SES is a spinout group that has different values relative to: how credit is associated with a course, what academic credentials are needed to teach a course, and how much teaching can be individualized through correspondence course. This group has held these values for some time, but with increasing use of technology and visibility of their courses, other faculty in the University are becoming aware of the differences.

The formation of CAE was a type of "heavyweight team" and "spinout". When it was first formed, a heavyweight team of faculty were given substantial time allocations of time to focus on improving student learning and community learning. In retrospect, the formation of this team had a major impact on PSU's teaching culture but it took approximately 3 full time faculty positions (moved to be directors of the center), several half-time "faculty-in-residences", several full time staff and student help, and technology support. CAE was also a "spinout" in the sense that this group was allowed to operate under a separate set of values that were almost totally focused on teaching and learning.

EVALUATION

Portland State needs to consider how to incorporate both sustainable and disruptive innovations into its effort to change. There are many institutional factors that promote stability but also resist disruptive change, including budgeting processes, curricular review processes, democratic self-governance, and unionized faculty and staff. There are particular areas of educational technology, flexible-format courses and curriculum, distance education and computing services that should be addressed both for incremental, sustainable change and the opportunities for disruptive innovations.

For Portland State, one message is that we need to find a way to take some risks that might pay off in the long term. It seems that the current mode is for the risk to be attributed to the individual faculty and yet the departments are supposed to be risk-averse. Faculty time can be risked in different initiatives but resource strapped departments have to act very conservatively to meet their yearly bottom line. This distribution of risk has the consequence of separating our most expensive and valuable asset, faculty time, from resources that are required to make the use of that asset both efficient and successful. We need substantially funded, cross-functional teams that could work on projects with timelines of two to four years and could be rewarded if they succeed but yet responsible for reporting about their failures in detail. It should be expected that the outcomes from these team projects would be custom tailored to PSU. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of these projects we should try to support these in our general operating budget rather than look for funding from national granting agencies whose mission usually requires searching for "national models". It will take this type of change in the resource and reward environment to support innovation and change in our unique PSU culture.

REFERENCES

Christensen, C. M., Bohmer, R., and Kenagy, J. (2000) Will Disruptive Innovations Cure Health Care? Harvard Business Review 78(5):102-112.

Christensen, C. M., and Overdorf, M. (2000) Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Innovation. Harvard Business Review 78(2):66-76.