New business models are disrupting industry after industry. An industry where everybody is expecting big disruption and new business models is education.
Very often these business models are driven by newly available technologies that enable producers to get in contact with consumer without a middleman (e.g.ebay, airbnb), new forms of cooperation along the value chain (open innovation, mass customization), new revenue collecting mechanism (crowdfunding, paypal, square) to name a few.
Education as it is today is broken and this is well documented. It is elite, typically one-way, not personalized, expensive and is reaching – even in developed countries – too few people. The big disruption that everybody is talking about are so-called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). They are obviously not elite, open to everybody, and reaching a lot of people – some MOOC having more than 130.000 students).
But experience has taught us that industries are rarely disrupted by a single new business model but with a whole array. And while MOOC solve some of the issues in education, they are still typically a one-way learning experience and elite in so far as up to now only very few elite universities have the means and ambition to produce and distribute them. And personalization very often only goes so far as students can learn at their pace. But what they learn in which order is still opposed upon them.
We therefore see the opportunity for other business models in education to be established. One that we have been working on at ESCPEurope for the last 8 years is what we call Open Co-constructed Courses (OCC). These courses, for example our Paris Factory program are open and free (or at minimal cost) to everyone, highly personalized as they are co-constructed, not elite, and most important of all mulit-directional, e.g. teaching and learning is done by and for everyone.
Open
Here open means that everybody that wants to learn and share can take part in the program. There are no academic or other pre-conditions. Everybody can apply by explaining what they are interested in and what they are willing to share. But as the program is not online there is as for now a restriction due to the room size and number of chairs in a room. But we are working with larger and larger settings.
Co-constructed
The program is co-constructed. Besides the overall topic and a sort of a general frame (number of hours, dates, some general topics) the content is to a large extend co-constructed by the teachers, current students, former students, and the larger entrepreneurship community in Paris. Am important part of the program is the so-called “teach it yourself” slots, where we openly invite people to offer workshops on topics related to entrepreneurship where they feel that they are experts. This year we were able to offer xx workshops on different topics like: financing for start-ups, using crowdfunding, finding developers and many more. These workshops were offered by some students from the current batch, some former participants of the program, start-ups from our incubator Blue Factory, and others.
We are just at the beginning of the disruption of education and the future will show us many different business models. We are really interested in your opinion about OCC. In our next blog we will go deeper into the different elements of the business model of OCC.
photo by Maëva Tordo during CIY Night Education
