| | OCTOBER 20238IN MY OPINION By Ronan Gruenbaum, Global Director of Undergraduate Learning & Development, Hult International Business SchoolADAPT OR DIE: THE CHANGING EDUCATION LANDSCAPEEvery few years, an innovation comes along which proves to be disruptive to many and a great opportunity for some. Those who seize the opportunities afforded by innovation tend to excel and leap ahead in their field compared to the competition. Often, they are smaller organizations, startups even, and because they are small, they tend to be agile and can pivot and embrace new strategies quickly, whereas the larger, more entrenched organizations, like the proverbial oil tanker, take a comparatively enormous amount of time to move to a new direction.Now, this is, of course, obvious. We teach it in strategy classes and courses on disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship at business school, and it is probably true of all sectors. It is most definitely true of education in general, higher education, universities, and business schools.Back in the 1960s, the UK's 'Open University' embraced television to engage and teach its students spread throughout the country and broadcast lectures late at night on BBC 2, when all other channels had switched off for the night. Many of us in the UK will remember seeing these beardy academics in ill-fitting shirts and wide-knitted ties doing the same thing they would in a lecture hall, but now able to reach thousands studying part-time.The 80s brought the personal computer, and with the CD-ROM in the late 80s and 90s, encyclopedias and other didactic resources were available at reasonable cost to millions. The worldwide web in the 1990s took a while to get going, restricted by low bandwidth technologies but allowed the development of the 'crowd in the cloud' where everyone was able to create their own website and expound on their pet topic. The development of faster broadband at the turn of the century meant that we could start enjoying video calls for free! We could watch videos on YouTube and create our own, building on the personalized content-creation from before and discovering new resources. The growth of social media in general and the plethora of platforms for content sharing has since made the options available enormous and allowed for the growth of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), where costs went down and, as per the laws of supply and demand and price elasticity, demand went up. In the nineties, virtual worlds started to expand, with many international business schools and universities building campus buildings and lecture theatres in Second Life, experimenting with having the educational experience entirely within a 3-dimensional virtual graphic interface.And, of course, we had the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing everyone to barricade themselves at home and join classes on Zoom, Google Classroom, or MS Teams.Some universities, such as the Open University, were again quick to exploit these new technologies early, but despite the ability to get more interaction with the students, most seemed to still focus Ronan Gruenbaum
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