Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast #76. I have been rebroadcasting some of the best of the last two years over the summer. Today is the day after labour day when the year truly begins for North American educators. Normally I would start a new podcast today but the thoughts and ideas from my late June instalment were significantly important enough to re-podcast most of it to start our journey for this year. Over the next few weeks I want to visit the concept that Christian Educators by our very nature must become educational reformers. It is my perspective that education as a whole, both public and most of private, has begun to buy into a pattern of pragmatic reform.  This goes to the very reasons of why we are educating our children. When we clearly set the path as to why we are educating and for what ends then we will know exactly what reforms are necessary. As I have podcasted in the past, our goals must be distinctly God directed coming from a deep understanding of scripture and our relationship with Him. Even our ideas of goals must be governed by our relationship. Every relationship may have some goals. A man and women marry so that they can build a family together. We enter a friendship so that we will not be alone in the future. But the relationship itself should become larger than the goal if it is built on truth and love. Our journey with our children must become more than our goals of education. We must see education in its most sublime and portentous aspect, that is, we are in a relationship with our children that compels us to prepare them, help them and perhaps even shape them for their gifts and calling. This is what we call discipleship based Christian education.

Christian educators are therefore involved in three crucial reforms which I hope to continue to explore with you this upcoming year. We are obviously involved in reforming the curriculum for our students into a Christian view of the world. Much has been said about this in our circles of education and it is important to continue to carry forward this discussion. I am reminded of how significant this reform is every time we hire a new teacher who has been trained by our secular universities and public schools. Secondly, we have to create an environment and experience for our students that is transformational.  Thus we have to reform our concepts and attitudes about the teacher - student relationship and the institutional way in which we think about school and all its processes. Again is our goal to produce economically secure and sound citizens or are we seeking to disciple Christians who will have a dynamic relationship with God and understand their place and mission upon this planet? To reach the latter, from start to finish, our children's education will have to become a transformative experience and not just a programming of their ideas. The final area of reform is what this book, Disrupting Class, is about; as Christian educators we have to participate in the reforming of how we do education. We are educating children for a 21st Century, a digital world. There is nothing significantly Christian about this reality, it is just the time and place that we have been called to be faithful. The reforms that are coming to education will be dramatic and will alter nearly everything about how we do school and how we school our children. These reforms will happen globally and they will disrupt entire educational systems worldwide. As Christians we have a unique position at this time. We can either continue to follow the old patterns and methods of schooling that have arisen from our modern industrial society or we can innovate and retool.  Because our Christian schools or home schools are outside of the politically entrenched cultures of the public school systems we can embrace this third educational reform without the enormous pressures that many systems are facing today. This is what the book Disrupting Class began to help me see. Here is my podcast from June:

This April I attended the annual Virtual School Society Conference and, like the last couple of years, found it to be very inspiring on a number of levels. The conference brings together educators who work in the genre of Distributed Learning and those interested in the integration of technology and education. The conference always seems to have at least one or two speakers who stand out as leading educators in this important direction and this year was no exception. The first keynote was Michael B. Horn, co-author and graduate student of Clayton M. Christensen. Together with, educator and political consultant, Curtis Johnson they have written Disrupting Class, How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns. Clayton Christensen, Professor of Business Administration as the Harvard Business School and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, has been developing solid business theory of why great business and industries fail as a result of “disruptive innovation.” For the last four years he has brought a team of researchers together to apply this theory and explore some of the very difficult challenges facing education particularly in the U.S. As I sat and listened to Michael Horn present their business concepts and application to education I experienced somewhat of an epiphany. He was explaining exactly what we have been doing for the last five years at Heritage Christian Schools particularly with our Online School.

Let me start by explaining the theory in a business context first. Christensen set out to discover why good companies and entire industries fail and his discoveries have been extremely enlightening and prophetic especially in the light of so much technological innovation in the last 50 years. There are two types of innovations that affect any industry and bring either improvement or disruption. The first type of change is called sustaining innovation. Any good company or industry that has experienced success in the market place begins to work with their customers, suppliers, distribution chains to create improvements in their products and systems. These are called a sustainable innovations. These improvements can be gradual or dramatic. Airplanes that fly farther, computers that process faster, cellular phone batteries that last longer and televisions with clearer images are all sustaining innovations. As products mature and develop quite often the improvements are beyond the average consumer ability to take advantage of the subtle innovations such as in the car industry many of the improvements in speed and agility of a vehicle will never be needed. Who needs a car to be able to go 270 kilometres an hour. Nevertheless, it is the nature of almost every industry to move in the direction of sustainable innovations. Christensen explains, “In our research, we have found that in almost every case, the companies that win the battles of sustaining innovation are already the industry leaders. And it seems not to matter how technologically challenging the innovation is. As long as it helps the leaders make better products that they can sell for better profits to their best customers, they figure out a way to get it done.” Generally companies tend to move toward their best customers. In the case of the high end computer markets in the sixties through the end of the eighties IBM, DEC, Wang all developed products of sustaining innovations that meet the needs of their high paying customers. They would work to develop improvements in their machines that their best customers were requesting. This made these main frame computers and mini computers faster, more robust and most of all more profitable. As the big companies, organizations and governments, the only people that could afford these massive computers, requested more storage, speed, software improvements the industry leaders responded with further sustaining innovations that kept the customers happy and the profits rolling in. Industry leaders like these technology giants continue to grow and develop their products and market share in an upward trajectory until something from outside or underneath disrupts the entire market.

Christensen commented on these described phenomenon in the computer industry, “The main frame companies focused their innovative energies on making bigger and better mainframes. They were good and successful at what they did. The same was true in automobiles, telecommunications, printing, commercial and investment banking, beef processing, photography, steel making, and many, many other industries. All that would seem to make for a boring and orderly world. But from time to time, things get shaken up when a different type of innovation emerges in an industry – a disruptive innovation.”

Disruptive Innovation almost never comes from the industry leaders because companies are not constructed in such a way as to disrupt themselves. They seek to sustain their place in the industry and see disruptive innovation as a challenge to their very existence and indeed it is. Let me illustrate with one of the most successful and thriving industries in the early part of the last century. For centuries people worked to find ways to bring ice into their homes, hospitals, restaurants year round. What emerged in the latter part of the 1800’s all the way into the 1930s was a robust service industry that brought ice year round to major cities throughout North America. The leaders of this industry developed amazing sustainable technologies, networks and systems to get ice to their customers. They built Ice Houses, special railway cars, created better ice boxes to keep the ice longer. They developed networks from alpine areas where ice could be generated and harvested throughout the long summers. They built elaborate marketing chains to get the ice to the customers. Every improvement in this industry enabled the ice companies to get more ice to more customers for longer periods of time. Then along came the discovery of Freon and the compressor. For almost 100 years inventors were able to create ice by using compressing certain gasses. Unfortunately the gasses that were the most successful in the freezing process where toxic. In the late 1920’s innovators discover Freon and within 15 short years the entire Ice Industry experienced dramatic melt down. The Ice Company’s technologies and systems were set up in such a way that they couldn’t incorporate this innovation. What was once a thriving industry completely disappeared because of this disruptive innovation. What is interesting is when the first Freon compressors and freezer/refrigerators came out they didn’t market to the big cities initially. They went to those areas that were not served by the ice industry. They freezers were not that reliable when they came out and only made small amounts of ice as compared to the large blocks you could acquire from the ice companies. But the lesser affective freeze was still an improvement on no ice at all. This in turn gave the freezer manufactures the ability to create a market from non ice consumers, develop their technology and eventually bring it into the established ice serviced cities. In almost all cases disruptive innovations first serve and thrive in a non-consumer market before they disrupt the established market and industry.

This can be seen clearly in the computer market. As mentioned earlier, the computer industry was focused on building bigger main frame and what was called mini computers. By today’s standards there was nothing mini about these machines that were the size of a small car.  They served a very expensive and exclusive market of large corporations, organizations, universities and governments. It was impossible for the average consumer to every own or use one of these machines. Along came Tandy (Radio Shack) Apple and Microsoft. They had a vision to bring computers to the office and the home. They built machines that were significantly inferior to the Wang, IBM or the DEC mini computers but they targeted a consumer group that these big computer manufactures didn’t care about. These companies continued to improve their main frame and mini computers for their big customers and really didn’t think that the “micro-computers” would have much of an impact on their product. But the micro computers got better and stronger. They created markets for their products that enabled these machines to improve at a much faster pace. By the time the Pentium computer and MS Windows began dominating the market in the 90’s nearly every office had a computer and they were performing most of the tasks that the pervious mainframe and mini computers managed. Today’s 6 pound laptops are many times more powerful than those old beasts. These small garage based companies created a disruptive innovation that swallowed up those powerful icons of the computer industry. The only reason IBM survived is they created a completely separate and autonomous division to build their own micro computers. They still needed Microsoft to keep them in the game. Look who is leading the industry today. 

Heritage Christian School has been developing a disruptive innovation for the educational industry. For the last 30 years we have been bringing computers into our schools but they have had little impact on how we teach. We have added a course called IT and have taught computers as a subject but we have yet to develop applications that allow the computer to truly integrate into the classroom automate the many educational processes we repeat over and over with our students, until now.  Christensen calls the innovation, “student centric computer based learning.” In his book he focuses on the need to develop systems of education that take us away from the monolithic classroom approach where one size fits all. He argues the case for different learning styles and different types of intelligences and how the student centric computer based learning can answer many of these problems. Christensen explains, “Up until this point in time, student-centric technology in the form of computers hasn’t had much impact on mainstream public education. But as is the case with all successful disruptions, if you know where to look-competing against non-consumption computer-based learning is methodically gaining ground as students, educators and families find it to be better than the alternative-having nothing at all. Despite scepticism and pessimism from many that the lack of an open market means that schools would not implement this computer-based technology in a disruptive fashion, things are changing.” We have seen this in dramatic proportions here in BC. Gord Robideau in a recent conversation with an enrolment officer reported that in a recent conversation Universities are now dealing much more with students who have received some level of online education. He reported that last year’s enrolments involved about 1% of the students with online courses whereas this year they are seeing as much as 11% of the students using online courses in their entrance requirements.

When Heritage decided to go into Online Education Industry we did several things right that has enabled us to cultivate this disruptive innovation. First we separated the Distributed Learning School from our traditional campus school. In hindsight I can see that we would never have been able to develop the innovation to the groups we had to go to without creating a completely separate division. Remember that those in the industry will not naturally disrupt themselves. Secondly we went to two non-consumer groups with our innovation. The first was the Home School market which has always been considered a non-consumer group as far as schools were concerned. We have successfully developed our educational market to serve these students. The other place where we have grown dramatically to another non-consumer market is in BCOS to our cross enrolled students. Christensen identified both of these markets in his analysis of the educational industry and the place to look for disruptive innovation, “Homebound and home schooled students are another ideal market application for computer based learning. …. Another big non-consumption opportunity is students who need to make up credits.”

When we first started five years ago one could argue that our product was inferior to that of the traditional classroom and in some respects I would have to agree. Like any disruptive innovation the product or service reaches an under-served market with something they don’t have. We have been able to provide a service for home educators and distance learners to connect into the BC Educational program, receive funding, have teacher support and receive diplomas. Were we able to do this in a larger scale and with more “professionalism” in the traditional school, perhaps not. But the alternative to this non-consumer group was nothing at all so our innovation found a niche market. The same was true of our cross enrolled students. They needed to retake a course, have the freedom that an online course can give in their schedule, improve a mark or find a different method. Again what we provided was better than the alternative, nothing. But as we have been serving these two communities we have been gaining momentum. We have been honing our skills and creating courses that now, meet and exceed what can be done in the classroom. We have already begun to see our courses making an inroad into the classroom in the areas of the curriculum that schools have struggled with such as Planning 10. We have helped many small schools add to their limited list of courses. We are beginning plans to integrate student centric computer based learning in our high end areas of the curriculum such as Principles of Math 12, Chemistry 11 and 12. We are working to make our courses textbook-less. Our goal will be able to provide a full curriculum to students and schools that will automate what the text book does and as much of the monolithic way in which the classroom works today as well.

What Christensen’s book has done has given me the theory behind what God has been leading us into the past five years. It is our vision, no rather it is our commission, to bring Christian Education into this disruptive innovation that will be transforming the way we educate our children. It is our vision to be leaders in this industry so that our movement will continue to thrive in this digital world. We want to make disciples of our children for the 21st Century world. Here is Christensen’s closing comments in his book, “There is power in our communities to effect change. By disrupting the classroom, as we now know it, we can break apart the fundamental obstacles with which education, parents, and students have struggled for so many years. These technologies and organizational innovations are not threats. They are exciting opportunities to make learning intrinsically motivating, that make teaching professionally rewarding, and that transform our schools from being economic and political liabilities to source of solutions and strength.”

I look forward to another great year of podcasting. Please email us your comments and thoughts on today’s podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book or send you the download link for the audio version of, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.