YakShaving

Yesterday, I (this is Ash writing) gave a presentation to all of the senior faculty at the IIT Stuart Business School about BettrAt and the future of informal learning.

I think the presentation went pretty well (apart from me making a silly mistake with the domain and thinking that the site was down in a state of nervousness) so I couldn’t demo.

After I finished up the presentation, a senior member of the faculty who was running the meeting stood up and said “If the project that Ash is working on or a similar one can truly disrupt education and learning as we know it, do I need you people?” (Talking to the other faculty members there). A hush of silence went over the room… and I was a little thrown by the provocative delivery of the question. I didn’t want to answer though, so I just quietly slipped out while leaving a stack of business cards on the table.

This is something that comes up again and again, particularly after reading Clay Christensen’s Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Instructors are potentially worried that their jobs are on the line in this new era of digital learning and instructional delivery. This fear is unfounded, and preposterous. A simple attitudinal shift would help people in the role of instructing (that is, teachers, coaches, and consultants) that the nature of their job is changing from delivering education to facilitating learning.



People will always have a limited amount of time left in their days (except for Zack Morris who can freeze time), and the amount of information coming at them isn’t decreasing anytime soon. We’ll continue to need human enabled platforms to provide a pathway to learn and improve oneself. If anything, people who are in the role of instructing should welcome platforms like BettrAt to help assemble customized learning plans for individuals because it makes their job easier and they have better “work product”– the students who have learned more and are capable of achieving more.

Organizations that primarily care to help their consumers live richer and more productive lives (the ones that are going to win in the long run anyway) will surely embrace ways to deliver more customized content that maps to what all of their individual consumers are trying to accomplish in their lives. The smart ones will recognize that mass channels are insufficient, ineffective, and can’t compete with personalized ones.