Disrupting Clayton Christensen's Speech about Disrupting Education
Response to the talk by Clayton Christensen, sponsored by the UVU Faculty Senate (and, given those in attendance, by President Holland and by all the UVU Vice Presidents and Deans and by the UVU School of Business and by the BYU School of Business and by the BYU School of Law, etc.) As befits a professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen’s basic question was how universities can teach their students more cheaply and thus make more money and avoid being “disrupted” or “killed” by private universities like the University of Phoenix. The short answer, according to him, is online and hybrid courses. MOOCs, for example. It would be much more efficient, he said, for a single MIT physics professor to tape a set of physics 101 lectures that all universities could use for their physics 101 course. Ditto economics 101, and so on. (No thought of the advantage of local professors in first-year classes to inspire and mentor and lead students to majors that match their interests