Frank Hecker

[This is part 2 of a two-part post. Part 1 discusses the future of education and the possibility of customized online educational offerings as a disruptive innovation that might eventually grow to rival and even dominate traditional educational systems. It ended with a question: what does this have to do with Mozilla? I now attempt to answer that question.]

Online education evolves to be user-driven, not vendor-driven

By definition disruptive innovations allow users to do things they could previously not do, or could do only at great expense and/or effort. But while disruptive innovations make users’ lives easier, they typically make vendors’ lives harder, at least initially, because creating truly disruptive products can be difficult and expensive. (For example, think of all the industrial design, usability engineering, software development, and other work that Apple put into creating the iPhone and its simplified user experience for running mobile applications and using the web from a handheld device.)

The first products that embody disruptive innovations thus tend to have a high degree of internal integration and a relatively closed architecture (again, consider the iPhone). However over time the state of the art advances to the point where vendors can create comparable products using modular components communicating through standardized interfaces. (Christensen’s favorite example here is Microsoft Windows vs. Linux distributions; in the mobile space would-be contenders include Android and Limo.) This move to modularity also allows disruption in the commercial system, i.e., the context within which a firm establishes its cost structure and operating processes and works with its suppliers and channel partners to respond profitably to customers’ common needs (Disrupting Class, p.124).

In particular, Christensen and his co-authors believe that the first-generation commercial system for online education is too tied to the current commercial system for education in general, and shares its orientation to expensive one size fits all solutions. They predict an eventual move to a new commercial system organized as a facilitated user network, in which users exchange with each other as opposed to being supplied by traditional vendors, with one or more third parties facilitating that exchange (as, for example, YouTube facilitates the exchange of video content):

[In] the first phase of disruption of the instructional system the software will likely be complicated and expensive to build. … Within a few more years, however, two factors that were absent in stage 1 that are critical to the emergence of stage 2 will have fallen into place. The first will be platforms that facilitate the generation of user-created content. The second will be the emergence of a user network …. The tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classroom. … User networks … will be the business models of distribution. This will allow parents, teachers, and students to offer these teaching tools to other parents, teachers, and students. (p.134)

So: modular interoperable standards-based products, user-created content, and user networks within which such content gets created and freely distributed. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like something Mozilla knows something about.

Tasks for the Mozillas

Let’s assume that education will indeed involve in the direction of user networks producing user-generated and -distributed content for customized online education. Let’s further suppose the continued growth of a movement to ensure that this and other educational content is freely available for others to use and adapt. This certainly sounds like a movement that is in line with the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto (which notes, among other things, that [the] Internet is … a key component in education …), and a trend we might like to encourage. How we might do so in a manner consistent with the Mozilla DNA? I think the answer varies based on the particular Mozilla entity in question (what I call the Mozillas within the overall Mozilla project).

The task of the Mozilla Corporation I think would be mainly to continue on the path it’s currently on. Any modular standards-based personal learning environment or open learning network is likely to be based on web technologies, and the goal is to have Firefox be the very best way there is to bring the web to end users. There are some particular areas that might be relevant to an educational context, though not necessarily limited to that context.

For example, the Mobile Firefox effort will help bring the full power of Firefox to future low-end 4P computing systems that might be deployed for primary and secondary education, and initiatives to support open audio and video formats would assist in efforts to provide rich learning experiences whose delivery doesn’t depend on proprietary technologies. There might also be some supplemental work that might be called for; for example, robust out-of-the-box support for MathML and other specialized markup languages is clearly more important for the educational market than for the general consumer market to which Firefox is pitched.

Mozilla Messaging is a somewhat different case, and perhaps a more interesting one in terms of how a focus on education (which, again, would not be the sole focus) might help shape a future strategy. As I see it, one problem with Thunderbird is that its user base is often conceived of in negative terms: they’re people who don’t like webmail and don’t want to use Outlook. I think Thunderbird and related technologies need a real constituency, a group of people for whom the product is designed to fit their special and distinct needs, and who respond to that focus with enthusiasm. That constituency might be found within the traditional enterprise market, but I confess I’m concerned about Mozilla Messaging trying to re-fight the groupware wars that Netscape lost a decade ago.

Might Mozilla Messaging be able to find its constituency, or at least a significant part of it, within the educational market? Educational institutions are certainly more open to standards-based open source products than your typical enterprise. Also, to the extent that Mozilla Messaging is about not just email but about the broader market for collaboration and communication tools, the education market certainly has a lot of models for collaboration and communication — one to many instruction, one-to-one tutoring, small group collaboration, synchronous vs. asynchronous, text vs. video vs. audio, and so on. So perhaps this might be a fruitful question for Mozilla Messaging to explore: What types of collaboration and communication products would be needed to support advanced online learning environments, and could Mozilla technologies be instrumental in creating such products?

Next comes what might be called the missing Mozilla. As Gerv Markham recently noted, with minor exceptions (e.g., the HTML editor in SeaMonkey) the Mozilla project has for the most part left to others the task of creating tools for web content creation and application development. Is this an area we should look at re-entering over the coming years? In the educational context, consider what sort of rich content might go into a simple Physics 101 online course: mathematical equations, static and dynamic graphs, interactive simulations of experiments, perhaps some archival video, and so on. It would be a shame if people created, distributed, and collaborated on lots of great open education courses like this, but they turned out to be a collection of glorified Flash or Silverlight apps. Should Mozilla do something about this and, if so, how might it best be done? This is a question that extends beyond the context of education, and I think one that needs to be discussed.

Finally we come to the Mozilla Foundation. What role if any might it play in an educational context? The Mozilla Foundation could certainly endorse and perhaps help shape a particular vision for education along the lines discussed above, and could lend moral, financial, and other support to other groups working on the front lines to make it happen. (By coincidence the proposed new executive director for the Mozilla Foundation has relevant experience in this area.) It could also encourage the Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Messaging, and others within the overall Mozilla project to make Mozilla-based technologies and products the preferred ways by which next-generation customized online education is experienced by end users; where there are gaps in capabilities, the Foundation could provide some funding and other support to help fill those gaps (as we did with accessibility, for example). Finally, the Foundation could go further and pick a particular subproblem within the broad educational space and seek to play a leading role in addressing it.

Most notably, the Mozilla Foundation has a clear interest in (and has already financially supported) the work at Seneca College to bring open source development methodologies into the classroom. The Foundation could continue and expand upon that work, including working with Seneca to promote the adoption of similar Mozilla-related curricula at other like-minded institutions and the creation of Mozilla-related materials suitable for self-education. Beyond focusing just on Mozilla, the Mozilla Foundation could also work with others to change the entire manner in which the next generation of software developers is educated. This could include teaching software development in a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary manner in which topics like QA and release engineering, project organization and governance, user experience, marketing and evangelism, copyright and other legal issues, and others assume equal importance to traditional computer science and programming language instruction. It could also include expanding the range of contexts within which software development is taught — not just in formal academic institutions but also within informal learning collectives associated with open source projects or other groups of people with common interests and objectives.

Ten years until the revolution?

If Christensen and his co-authors are correct, in about ten years time we could very well reach a tipping point in which the educational system in the US and elsewhere will rapidly transition from the traditional instructor-in-the-classroom model to a model based on customized online education provided on standards-based platforms and supported by a network of teachers, students, and others collaboratively creating, distributing, and recombining rich collections of instructional materials. Today we stand at a point in online education comparable to the late 1970s and early 1980s with respect to personal computers or the late 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the Internet and the web: We can envision the promise of what might come, and have early examples of that promise to learn from and build on. But we do not know exactly how the story will play out, who its heroes (and villains) will be, and whether it will have a happy or sad ending for those of us who value openness, freedom, and grassroots participation. We may have an opportunity to help shape how that story unfolds. Should Mozilla grasp that opportunity? That’s the question I’m putting forth for discussion.

[This is part 1 of a two-part post; part 2 is here.]

Lately there have been a flurry of posts and associated comments discussing possible future activities that the Mozilla Foundation (and by extension the Mozilla project) might undertake in support of its overall mission and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. This post is an experiment in thinking about an area the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla in general) might consider getting involved in, one possibility out of the many that have been discussed in the various posts referenced, and one of a number of themes that might inspire particular elements of an overall strategy. As usual, these are my personal opinions only.

Educating a constituency for the open web

The particular focus of this post is education, and in particular online education. Why education? Not (just) because it’s a big important issue — there are lots of important issues in the world, and education is only one of them. There are also many nonprofit organizations, private sector entrepreneurs, and government agencies working on a host of education-related initiatives. Why should Mozilla get involved as well?

The answer is that education is evolving (or could easily evolve) in ways that are potentially very compatible with the goals of Mozilla, and there are ways in which we could get involved in education-related initiatives that are consistent with the Mozilla DNA. In effect we have an opportunity to help build a constituency for the open web and the general principles of the Mozilla Manifesto, not through traditional advocacy efforts but by helping to educate (and, in doing so, create) a new generation of web users and participants for whom such principles are second nature.

The disruptive potential of customized online education

Many people project and advocate for a future dominated by openness, a world of participation, decentralized and virtual organizations, and individual empowerment — in essence taking the principles and practices of the free software and open source movements and applying them to all aspects of society. Education is no exception, and thus there is an open education movement as well. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is a good summary of the goals of the movement, not least because it addresses not just open access to educational content (e.g., as provided by the MIT OpenCourseWare project), apparently the primary initial focus of most open education proponents, but also the broader range of open and collaborative technologies that might be applied in an educational context. This is wonderful work, with lots of exciting projects under way.

However I think we also need some guidance on how, where, and when open education initiatives might be most successful, guidance that will enable us to decide how, where, and when it might make sense for Mozilla to get involved in them. My preferred framework for thinking about these sort of questions is the theory of disruptive innovation created and popularized by Clayton Christensen. Coincidentally, Christensen and his co-authors have recently provided an analysis of how disruptive innovation might occur in the context of education, in the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns.

Before going on, I’ll note that (having read all of Christensen’s books) I don’t think Disrupting Class is his finest work. It is very US-centric, relies a bit overmuch on ideas such as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences that are unproven at best, and takes some major detours, particularly after chapter 5. I recommend just reading the first five chapters, and supplementing it with Christensen’s discussion of post-secondary professional education in chapter 5 of Seeing What’s Next. (Or you can just read the condensed version of Christensen’s and his co-authors’ thesis in the article How Do We Transform Our Schools.)

Nevertheless I think the core of the book is sound in applying Christensen’s theories to the topic of primary and secondary education. The key points of the book are as follows:

The problem with primary and secondary education is not lack of innovation per se, rather it’s that the primary innovation attempted is sustaining innovation within the existing system. It is primarily directed at incremental improvements in test scores and related measures important to politicians and their constituents, and occurs within a commercial system (including not only school systems but also textbook publishers and other creators of educational material) that is geared to providing a monolithic standardized one size fits all product

Disruptive innovation within the educational system will occur only at the margins, where there are needs to be filled and problems to be solved that (for whatever reason) are not being addressed by the existing system. Examples include providing a wide variety of advanced courses within school districts that cannot afford to offer such courses in the traditional way, serving student populations scattered across wide geographic areas, and serving home-schoolers and others who have opted out of the conventional educational system.

This disruptive innovation will take the form of customized instruction that is enabled by computer and networking technology but also incorporates a significant human element (for example, distance learning classes that include teacher-led instructional sessions, computer-based drill and practice, student-teacher interaction via email, student collaborative projects, and so on). Over time suppliers of customized online educational offerings will better learn what works and what doesn’t, and will use the experience gained in relatively marginal markets to develop new skills that will eventually allow them to move into more mainstream markets. (Incumbents typically don’t develop these skills because their dominance of existing markets leads them to ignore marginal and less profitable opportunities in new markets; thus Christensen refers to new market entrants as wielding the sword of asymmetric skills and the shield of asymmetric motivation.)

As a result, customized online education will show slow but steady growth in the coming years. Since it’s starting from a very small base, its overall market share will remain relatively insignificant for the next few years. However eventually the effects of continued compounded growth will cause customized online education offerings to become widespread and even dominant. Based on the data available Christensen and his co-authors estimate that although online education offerings account for only 1% of courses at present, they could grow to 25% of all courses by 2014, 50% by 2019, and 80% by 2024. (Note that they include in this total both fully online courses and courses that have a significant online component.)

A role for Mozilla?

This is all very interesting, but how does this relate to the goals of Mozilla, and to promoting the open web? The answer lies in Christensen’s ideas regarding how the commercial system around online education will evolve, based on experiences with disruptive innovations in other industries. More on that topic in part 2.