Burck Smith, the founder of StraighterLine, has written a very nice piece about Clayton Christensen, et al.'s Disrupting College (see Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education) for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In this article, Smith argues that, in fact, online education is acting as a sustaining, rather than disruptive, innovation at this time:
Yet the effects of disruption—vastly lower prices for consumers, new course providers, struggling old providers, and disaggregation of products—are not evident in higher education. Prices continue to rise and, with the possible exception of for-profit colleges, nobody new has appeared on the education landscape to deliver college courses. In practice, it seems as though online learning is simply a “feature enhancement” (like adding rubber tires to wooden wheels) that allows colleges to make their offerings attractive to more people.
