Introduction

Real Time

The Experience Economy

Synthesis

Introduction

This is a simultaneous review of two books:

Regis McKenna (1997) Real Time: Perparing for the age of the never satisfied customer. Harvard Business School Press.

and

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore (1999) The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Harvard Business School Press.

Although both of these books are aimed at the business and management market, some of the core concepts could be applied to higher education. As education moves to incorporate the internet into how we do business we need to try to understand the implications of our choices. This genre of book, that I call "airport books", usually have only several major points but are stretched out into several hundred pages of motivational stories. I've been downstream of this motivation in the past, and what might seem like the greatest new business ideas to managers comes across as just fads of the month to the rest of us. T

I have tried to sort through the motivational portion to find the kernal of thought that could be applied to our efforts. I will address these individually and then tie the main themes together.

Real Time

The tag line on the title really tells the crucial take home message for education; through all our efforts to serve the student better we are actually cultivating a situation where the student will never be satisified. This is actually a good thing!

We are giving students access to tools and information that will help them to make better decisions and will help them to take responsibility for their educational experience. We need to make sure that these tools provide some feedback to us on what students are looking for, what they found and what they didn't find. The internet communications that we use are fully capable of collecting this information and providing it back to us. We don't want to just capture mouse clicks, we want to provide them with the opportunities to give us information. It will help us to involve them in a dialog.

Education is a different industry than most of the others discussed in Real Time because our "customers" start out dissatisfied. They are not dissatisfied with us (the university) but they have some level of dissatisfaction with their current state in life that is driving them to learn more or aquire new credentials. This is much different, for example, from someone who sends their package via Federal Express and will be dissatisfied only if you provide poor service. We need to recognize then that our students are driven by dissatisfaction and we need to learn to channel that energy into some positive force for the university.

The kernal of the idea in this book for us to take home is that as we provide better, real time services and resources to the student, these services will actually drive their level of dissatisfaction up. The "Real Time" effect is that as they have more information and more responsibility, they will expect more from us. We need to make sure channels are open for them to tell us what they want.

One of the areas that I have seen the "Real Time effect" come into play is in student services for transcripts and academic information. The university may have thought that providing information over the web and allowing registration on the web would reduce student discomfort over course selection and help avoid registration problems. That happened, but in addition the students have become much more demanding for information. They do not appreciate the effort by the squads of people that put this system together, they want new features and new powers. The university should capitalize on this demand in two ways. First we should use the demand for more personalized information on course selection to steer students toward advising. I don't think we should try to put everything on the web. Make them see an advisor and talk about courses, careers and other aspects of academic life. The second thing the university must do is to start tracking requested courses and schedules. For example. if we know that 100 people requested a course that only allowed 40 in, and we do nothing about it, that is a major loss for both the individual students and the flow of the students. We may not be able to make immediate course reassignments, but we should be able to use that data in course planning and scheduling. Some schools require their students to submit a course plan by the end of the Sophomore year, this is both a great advising tool and a great curricular planning tool.

Another area where I have personally observed increased expectations and thus higher level entry dissatisfaction is with course materials posted to the internet. I used to be able to hand out the syllabus on the first day of class. Then I published that same syllabus to the internet before class started. I routinely get requests for the URL for my syllabus for a course that I will be teaching next term (one or two months ahead of time). The students have changed their expectations from,using the syllabus as a schedule for the course, to using the syllabus to help decide whether they want to sign up for the course in the first place. In some cases I am able to refer them to the last version of the course with the warning that it might be changed. In other cases, such as when I'm teaching a new course. I don't think I'll ever be two months ahead.

This book provided some very interesting examples from industry for which the lesson learned could be applied to education. I would recommend this to anyone who is considering improving a process in education by relying on the internet.
The book would help them understand that that improvement is just the first step in a change in the way they look at service.

The Experience Economy

This book provide three very important ideas for us in education:

Avoid the dangers of the commoditization of education through mass customization.

Judge the value of your experience by measuring the sacrifice that students have to make.

Construct your course, not as a product, but as an experience that students will want to revisit.

Higher education seems to be very interested in constructing and selling courses and training to a mass market; to create modules that can be sold, exchanged and used to generate revenue. Western Governors' University was constructed around the idea that courses could be brokered through a common clearing house.

According to this book, commoditization of educational materials is that last thing that we would want to do. Instead we should focus our efforts on "adaptive customization". This will require that we embed properties into our courses and education offerings that help students learn how to learn, and choose which type of learning environment they want.

Offering internet courses has helped provide flexibility. These courses are designed to make it easier for someone to take the course, but by doing that and by decreasing the sacrifice that the student must make inorder to take the course. (The book addresses this question in Chapter 5.) Although decreasing the sacrifice might work well for other industries or services, it may be counter-productive in education. For example, we have been assuming that flexibility in time will equal better learning outcomes because we will be letting them devote their attention and effort to the tasks when it is most effective for the student. It could very well be the opposite; that by offering our courses in a more flexible manner, the course becomes a lower priority and the students are leaving the course work until the last thing at night. This question needs to be rigorously tested, especially as we are expanding our recruiting to busy adult learners. Are we really increasing the value of the course by making it less of a sacrifice?

The main thesis of the book is that there is progressive value as we move from commodites (lowest value) to goods, to services to the experience. Education should be at this highest value level, because it is inherently an experience that can't be replaced. What is important for our internet courses is that we should be designing these courses as an experience that they might even want to enjoy again rather than trying to make them something the student only has to go through once. For example, I could create a set of self-contained notes and assignments that were meant to be completed and finished in my course or I could create a set of tutorials that helped students work through a particular assignment. The tutorials are activities that the student might use againi in another course when they run up against a similar problem. I have created tutorials that were used in the flow of one class and then re-used in other classes by either the same or different students. This was not only efficient for me (using the same media multiple times) but allowed the students to explicitly connect the content and skills they learned in one class to a subsequent class.

This Experience Economy contained some direct references to industry of education, but I don't think those sections were that valuable. You could get a good deal out of this book by reading the first six or seven chapters. After that, the metaphor of the theater becomes stretched to the point of weakness. I would give this book a qualified recommendation to people because it has some important points in the first several chapters.

Synthesis

Both books deal with how we can create products and provide services for people. McKenna observes that if continue on our current, well meaning path, we will eventually need to change our perception of people as customers to coworkers. He provides good examples for how this has happened in industry through the incorporation of technology. Pine and Gilmore, look at the value of what we do and explain how we can get a higher value by including our customers in an experience. Thus, both books emphasize the importance of a dialog with our students. McKenna explains that the motivation for this will be from the dissatisifaction of the client, that they will always want more and Pine and Gilmore tell us how to engage these people in an experience that will meet both our purposes and theirs.